Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native • Hacker News Board

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#381

Post by coffeefirst » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 3:19 PM UTC

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #320

202508042147 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS advantage over Google docs was exactly what US cloud providers have over everyone else: lock-in.

I mentioned MS because OOXML is now an open standard, albeit a 6000 pages one, but still open. And a similar sized competitor - Google, is still trying to deliver the same functionality. The point I'm trying to make is that going from zero to hero, even with basically "infinite" money like Google has is very very very hard.

I’m not sure it’s necessary. Office is bloated with features that very few people use on rare occasion. A much simpler word processor would do, and the next Google Docs doesn’t need to invent a lot of this stuff from scratch.

The tricky part is how many organizations have an enormous amount of business logic programmed into excel sheets.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#382

Post by snowpid » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 3:19 PM UTC

drooopy wrote: post #360

mytailorisrich wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are a little misled, on purpose, with the term "sovereignty", though. For instance, if you are a French entity then sovereignty means your data stay in France. Moving things to de facto EU control is the opposite of sovereignty. I think Chomsky would have a lot to say about this and the broad manufacturing of consent taking place across Europe.

The same chomsky who claimed that Epstein is a "highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation"?

In addition: the same chomsky who wanted to send Ukraine into oblivion?

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

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Post by crazygringo » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 3:19 PM UTC

Juliate wrote: post #258

crazygringo wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your customers want features that require compute and money, and your competitor offers them, then you don't really have a choice if you want to stay in business.

That's up to you (and the customers) to understand that the location where the compute/data is happening is as important a criteria to consider. As it is today.

What if your customers disagree?

Businesses generally shouldn't be trying to fight ideological battles, they should just be trying to meet their customers' needs. As long as they're not doing anything immoral/illegal like engaging in discrimination or dumping toxic waste.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

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Post by Nextgrid » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 3:20 PM UTC

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #364

Nextgrid wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could go on with the list of services currently used by the people that pay to push buttons I too can build an engineering playground where every ingress byte traverses as many AWS services as I can find. But if you're building a business application, how many of these do you actually need? Once you have the basic primitives you can fill in the gaps yourself if needed. But in the list you provided, Pub/Sub, CDN a…

> I too can build an engineering playground where every ingress byte traverses as many AWS services as I can find. But if you're building a business application, how many of these do you actually need? I gave a real list, and all of them have real reasons for being used. I don't know from where you got the idea that apps are built just by chaining cloud services aimlessly. A company has more than one application or n…

My point is that you can go very far and solve real-world problems with the basic primitives alone.

While I’m sure there are legitimate uses for the services you mentioned, I’ve also witnessed plenty of engineering playgrounds where complexity was a feature and services were used for the sake of it rather than due to a specific need.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

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Post by 9dev » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 3:21 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #369

9dev wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compliance and security testing does not go away just because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have extensive requirements regardless if you implement it yourself or buy it from an external supplier. That’s a bit disingenuous. If I don’t operate a physical server rack, I also do not need to take care of physical access control, fire suppression policies, ca…

Go through a security review. It not as simple as just saying "we outsource that so we have no idea what they do or how they manage the data". It is disingenuous to claim that people can just outsource the whole problem and not care. This would be part of the responsibility of the cloud managers, which need to be hired, paid and trained, on top of the cost of paying the cloud providers. There is no free lunch.

I am responsible for security reviews. I never claimed it was that simple, nor that there was free lunch. I said it is easier to outsource it than to handle it yourself to an equal level of what a cloud provider is able to do, from a legal and operational perspective.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

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Post by michaelt » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 3:22 PM UTC

nixpulvis wrote: post #298

michaelt wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own. If anything, I'd say for other countries it's more urgent. If China embargoes deliveries of light bulbs to Europe, all the light bulbs already in place keep working. The pain would grow over time - giving a grace period, to ramp up local production. If America embargoes AWS, Google, Apple a…

I'm absolutely not an expert, but critical things for power and food production not to mention medical supplies and emergency equipment are also tied up pretty deeply in international trade. The world would break pretty quickly if we all just stopped trading with each other.

Sure, but many products can be sourced from a load of countries.

If you can't get natural gas from Russia you can get it shipped from America or Australia or Qatar - it's expensive as hell, and you might need to quickly build new regasification plants, but your economy keeps running. And there's no remote kill switch that disables the gas you already have in-country.

That's not the case for the services provided by AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft though - the 'competition' is one US provider vs another.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

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Post by Throaway3126 » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 3:22 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #359

generic92034 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a bit more than "spitting on each other" which now is between the USA and its former allies. I seriously doubt that we will just go back to normal the moment there is a US president from the Democratic party. Possibly in some areas of politics and economy, in others (real) trust is more essential.

I believe at the moment it's still in the "spitting on each other" phase. Had Trump actually invaded Greenland* (and likewise if he does so in the future), that's where the Rubicon gets crossed and there's no going back. I kinda do want it to have passed that point, but not as much as I'm glad he TACOed. * There's other metaphorical Rubicons available, this is just the one most in my mind given I live in the EU

Trump and his team repeatedly saying they have no problems using force against Greenland and Canada were the red lines and they have already been crossed.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

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Post by arter45 » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #329

arter45 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll bite. Why is it not a cloud provider? Most importantly, what is a cloud provider in your definition?

In my book a cloud provider is a provider where you can spin up VMs at scale, offers multiple geographic regions across the world, offers managed complementary services such as S3, CDN, GLB, IAM, Managed Databases, backup & restore, FaaS, container registry, managed K8s or another container orchestration platform, PoPs around the world. Hetzner has an S3 compatible offering, a VPS offering and that's it. Their core b…

You know, we used to have a single tech company providing essentially an entire tech stack to its customers. Its core enterprise pricing provided a platform with impressive compute capabilities, high redundancy, global support, strong backward compatibility and the backing of a company providing consulting and an ecosystem made of a lot of other software products. That company is still alive and well, although that product is probably less appealing now to new customers.

I'm talking about IBM mainframes.

Eventually, as the Internet (networking) and open source technologies (like Git and Linux) become more and more widespread, people realized they could build their services by combining products from different vendors (not to mention FOSS). I'm talking about the 1990s-2000s.

Now, after 20-30 years, we're thinking that the same company must provide the entire tech stack or lose relevancy as a provider.

To be clear, AWS and mainframes are pretty different from a technical standpoint, but I do wonder if we're kinda repeating the same cycle over and over. Asking the same company to provide everything and then build stuff with different products, to then find a new company which can provide everything and so on.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#389

Post by RobotToaster » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

nixpulvis wrote: post #249

kioku wrote: post #43

> This isn't just compliance theater; it's a straight‑up national economic security play. The woes of LLM contrasts… In all seriousness, the points made ring true not only for European companies and should make everyone consider the implications of the current situation, as dreary as they are.

Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own. We used to live in a world converging toward maximal international trade, when in fact it was exploiting underdeveloped nations. As we progress globally, and as the development gap shrinks, we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way. So now what? How do w…

> If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.

One of the issues with the current system is that the WTO appellate body, which is effectively the court of world trade, requires USA approval for any appointments, which both Trump and Biden have refused to give. This effectively makes the WTO completely impotent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#390

Post by KellyCriterion » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 3:26 PM UTC

znnajdla wrote: post #239

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #169

I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire. And without a few hundreds of billions of EUR invested _today_ there will still be at least a decade until basic infrastructure will be somewhat on par with current day hyperscalers from the US. And Office suite wise, it took…

My theory is that 80% of workloads on AWS/GCP/Azure are pure waste. They sell complexity-as-a-service. 80% of startups and enterprises could run on a single beefy baremetal server (or two). AWS/GCP/Azure are the result of hype bubbles and VC-funded waste culture, it's not necessary for Europe to recreate that to compete.

Standard Hardware became so powerful over the last 10-15 years, even hightraffic sites from 2010 can be served today with one/two beefy machines.