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

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

#441

Post by agubelu »

michaelt wrote: post #288
nixpulvis wrote: post #249

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. 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…

> 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…

That would be as close to a declaration of war as you can get without firing a bullet.

The immediate and obvious response would be for the foreign branches of those companies to be declared "of national interest", nationalized and forced to keep operating.

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

#442

Post by vander_elst »

BSDobelix wrote: post #80
debugnik wrote: post #42

> 61 percent of European CIOs and tech leaders say they want to increase their use of local cloud providers. Oof, the company I work for is proudly telling us we've just migrated from a local provider to Azure, and partnered with Google for "digital sovereignty" solutions. Glad to know that's not the trend everywhere.

>Google for "digital sovereignty" solutions. Tell them about the Cloud Act and let those rusty wheels turn a bit. There is no sovereignty when working with a U.S.-based cloud company.

I think that Google has some partnership with Deutsche Telekom where they provide the software and Deutsche Telekom Runs it because Google doesn't have the encryption keys. In that case Google even if they want they cannot provide the data. Anyway that is still not digital sovereignity as Google might decide to stop providing updates or add a backdoor...

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

#443

Post by bluecalm »

yobbo wrote: post #310
bluecalm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>As a European, I am glad that this is finally discussed in the open! I have made multiple comments in the last weeks that one of the most important things, for me, is an alternative to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. The main reason we don't have an alternative to Visa/Mastercard duopoly is protectionism of EU countries. There are local alternatives that do pretty well (BLIK in Poland, Revolut Pay in countries where i…

> because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step. No, the gatekeeping is done by local banks and governments to protect their oligopolies/cartels. There are many instant-pay apps across Europe and they are intentionally not interoperable outside of local markets. Each local banking oligopoly is trying to fence off competition. The main fear is from smaller neo-banks.

>>No, the gatekeeping is done by local banks and governments to protect their oligopolies/cartels.

If you are pointing the distinction between gatekeeping at the EU level and country level I am not contesting that. It's clear though that the gatekeeping is the problem here (and in many other industries in EU).

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

#444

Post by carderne »

bborud wrote: post #144
atmosx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing EU cloud providers to AWS is like comparing a 1963 Zastava to 2025 high end BYD because both of them are cars and can drive from point A to point B.

Well, if the Zastava had 5-10x the amount of horsepower and storage space of the BYD for the same amount of money. Because that’s what is often the reality. Bare metal is unreasonably efficient compared to cloud services for not that much more know-how. I do tech DD work for investment funds etc and one thing I often see are slow, complex and expensive AWS-heavy architectures that optimize for problems the company do…

Out of interest, what control plane do you use for a Hetzner/metal setup? Kubernetes ecosystem?

I use Coolify for side projects, haven’t investigated whether I’d want to use it for bigger/importanter stuff.

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

#445

Post by Gimpei »

Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.

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

#446

Post by mytailorisrich »

kergonath wrote: post #190
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.

> 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. It’s something that crops up fairly often and I think most of the time from people who are profoundly misguided or just cannot understand that other people might see things differently. Germany is never going to annex parts of France while the EU is a thing.…

So if someone doesn't agree with the narrative and points out the obvious manipulation taking place they are wrong, misguided, or simply stupid... I mean, you couldn't prove my point any better, could you? And quite ironic, too about others seeing things differently...

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

#447

Post by nozzlegear »

embedding-shape wrote: post #117
202508042147 wrote: post #58

Last week I migrated our db away from AWS RDS to a European cloud provider. Everything runs fine and we also have it cheaper! One of our domains is due for renewal in a couple of months. I'm setting up the transfer to a EU registrar for it next week. This all takes time and it's not the most important thing for the bottom line, but on the long run I'm sure I'll look back and say it was a great investment.

> to a EU registrar Which one? I've been using DNSimple for so long, been trying to find something equally developer friendly who is based in Europe but haven't had much success. Used to use Gandi before DNSimple but it's obviously down the drain today.

I've been using DNSimple for ages and I'm looking to switch; not because of geopolitical reasons (I'm American), but they're just damn expensive for the simple dns and domain management stuff I use them for.

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

#448

Post by esskay »

dijit wrote: post #217
esskay wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think I'll move the goalpost - the original question was pretty clear; EU cloud providers who offer services like AWS does. What you've linked to is a broad scope site listing a multitude of EU based products and services, making it look like you cant even list ONE let alone a few . Don't pull the 'moving the goalpost' nonsense, the original post you replied to made it very clear they were talking abou…

“you offer managed databases, but RDS supports x ”. I can see it coming already, no point in extending this thread

Ok let me try this, because I can assure you my intent is not to throw some sort of "gotcha" in here. I'm thinking about this purely from my own personal usecase, and right now as far as I'm aware theres no AWS alternative in the EU that can do all this for me. Nothing I am using here relies on some sort of obscure feature of each service at all.

My usecase is:

- MySQL (using Aurora but really dont need to), hands off like it is on RDS so yeah a managed service would be preferred.

- 2x VM instances with internal networking and an EFS drive connecting the two (The efs drive is critical for a ton of applications)

- Load balancer

- S3 + Cloudfront for CDN

And a few more bits I appreciate are very niche to my usecase but would be nice to keep under the same vpc:

- SQS queue workers (can switch to something redis based if needed)

- SES mail service (again can switch to another 3rd party as i doubt many people offer this)

- Lambda for some app specific background processing

Hopefully this kinda explains my position. Yes, I can split a lot of this out into multiple individual providers who specialise in just that one thing. And perhaps that's the way to go. But I dont think you can deny it's a heck of a lot more convenient to have all of it in one place.

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

#449

Post by matthewdgreen »

Gimpei wrote: post #445

Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.

Well, at the early stages, yes. But at the point where incumbent tech firms have an insurmountable advantage, just adding more startups probably isn't going to save you. Entrenched providers can use their market power to buy up/outcompete/destroy any smaller competitors. You really need both a native market and a startup scene.

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

#450

Post by duttish »

Gimpei wrote: post #445

Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.

The divergence of being many smaller countries with different regulations, primary languages, currencies etc have been a blocker, but progress is being made[1] and it seems like people are aware of the problem. It just takes a while when every plan needs to be approved by all countries.

1. https://tech.eu/2026/01/20/the-european-commission-launches-...

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