9 ms·

I run a European cloud service, 80% of our customers are basically looking for a European alternative to the big clouds. The market is huge and in my opinion un

I run a European cloud service, 80% of our customers are basically looking for a European alternative to the big clouds. The market is huge and in my opinion underserved. What makes it very exciting is that there not too much innovation required to compete

shortrounddev2 2y ago
The European market has always seemed like a tertiary market compared to the US and Asia. I think that's because, despite having some raw number of euros to spend on a product, the European economy has struggled since 2008 compared to the US and Asia, and huge corps which are obsessed with growth don't see an accelerating future for Europe as a customer base.
- kergonath 2y ago
  Europeans are mostly comfortable giving money to American companies, and there is not as much of a culture difference as with Asia, so there is no need for separate offerings specially for Europe. All big tech companies have several subsidiaries that seem to be doing quite well. It’s true that there are not as many European startups than American ones, but the market is there.
- namaria 2y ago
  Which creates some juicy margin niches for smart developers to make a killing as independent contractors.
- dathinab 2y ago
  even if it has struggled it still is a lot of purchasing power and cloud is an essential service for many companies and how things played out in recent years has created increasing insensitive to not use Amazone/Google/MS Cloud but it's marked which isn't really that visible on HN and similar US focused sites
- layer8 2y ago
  Is “Asia” a well-defined market? Honestly curious.
  - shortrounddev2 2y ago
    No, you're right
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >European market has always seemed like a tertiary market compared to the US and Asia Well, this isn't even remotely accurate on the numbers. For virtually every big tech company the US is about half of the market, Europe about 30%, then ~15% Asian Pacific, and give or take a bit in the rest of the world. Given that most large tech companies are locked out of China or quickly leaving the only large country with comparable purchasing power to Europe in Asia is Japan.
  - nradov 2y ago
    It's about revenue growth opportunities, not current market share. Europe in general is largely stagnant, and seems likely to trend down due to the demographic time bomb. In Asia, South Korea is already comparable to Japan as a technology market (but also stagnating). The big Asia-Pacific growth opportunities are going to be in India, Malaysia, and Philippines.
    - shortrounddev2 2y ago
      Africa will soon emerge as an important market as well, particularly Nigeria. Japan and Korea are, as you said, not only stagnating but deflating (in the case of Japan). I believe GDP actually declined in Europe recently so I think Europe will shrink as a market in the coming decades unless they can fix demographic pressures and improve entrepreneurship. The US faces similar demographic problems but we have unique solutions to those problems that means that GDP growth is stronger in the US than virtually anywhere else in the world. India is a more mature "growing economy", and at this point I think the whole world is aware of the opportunities there. As you pointed out, Malaysia and the Philippines are growing, and so are other SE asian countries like Viet Nam and Thailand (though Thailand has struggled to grow since the pandemic, it's shown good growth since 2000). Africa is the untapped market right now; Nigeria is expected to exceed 400mil (if not 500-700mil) people by 2050. I don't know as much about their economy, so I'm not sure if this growth has translated into the kind of infrastructure which would create more demand for computing services (i.e: I don't know what smartphone or 5G penetration is like there), but I would bet that if it's not ripe yet, it will be soon Europe needs to solve its demographic pressures by either accepting more non-EU immigrants or doing something to encourage women to have more children, which would require solving for the opportunity cost (i.e: career stagnating or ending) that women bear 90+% of the time they have children, as well as the FOMO issues (which I don't think government can solve)
- fxtentacle 2y ago
  I believe this impression is mainly because people think of France and Germany as separate countries, not as a combined EU market. Imagine if you'd compare only California against all of China, it would look like the US was in seriously bad shape.
lossolo 2y ago
Do you compete in some kind of a niche? There is OVH in EU.
- RainaRelanah 2y ago
  And Scaleway (Online.net/Iliad). And Hetzner.
  - dathinab 2y ago
    and OTC (Open Telecom Cloud) But I wouldn't say it's a niche if you look at the size of the EU even if it "hasn't being doing that well" it's still a lot of purchasing power And especially in recent years there has been an increasing push away from US cloud providers and this somewhat evening out the playing field of "newcomers" compared to Amazone, MS, Google. Also because HN is quite US/SV focused and differences in business culture especially compared to SV about e.g. businesses doing blog post and similar you don't really see much at all from this marked on HN. But that doesn't mean it's not a big marked.
    - haukem 2y ago
      The Open Telekom Cloud was at least in the beginning running on Huawei hardware and software. Here is a press release from 2020: https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sichere-cloud-made-in-europe https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich... Title: Open Telekom Cloud – die sichere Cloud made in Europe > Im Rahmen der Innovationspartnerschaft liefert Huawei mit dem Cloud-Betriebssystem Huawei OpenStack Distribution eine zentrale Softwarekomponente der Open Telekom Cloud. English translation: Title: Open Telekom Cloud – the secure cloud made in Europe. > As part of the innovation partnership, Huawei provides a central software component of the Open Telekom Cloud with its cloud operating system, Huawei OpenStack Distribution.
      - dathinab 2y ago
        I know but AFIK they have moved await from it. Software wise they where anyway OpenStack based, which is a trusteable open source project Huawei is a major contributor to but other major contributors include AT&T, Canonical, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Intel, Red Hat, IBM. This made moving away from Huawei quite viable. Hardware wise they also moved away from Huawei, but I'm not sure if this apply to all data-centers of them. But AFIK at least some data centers are Huawei free. Or at least that is what they told some of their business partners which wouldn't have used them if they still used Huawei hardware in the data center that specific bussiness partner uses AFIK.
isoprophlex 2y ago
You're absolutely right: a huge, underserved market exists. Are you hiring? I'd love to work on a European big cloud alternative..!
stavros 2y ago
I use Hetzner cloud not because it's European, but because it's great.
- elric 2y ago
  Also because it's cheap.
  - stavros 2y ago
    That's a bonus!
- jedisct1 2y ago
  Same for me with OVH and Scaleway. Way cheaper than AWS and friends, and they just work.
  - temac 2y ago
    I'm using OVH and the notion of it "just working" is all relative. It's tolerable, but certainly a bit buggy, and with far less services than aws and co. It is also cheap, but given the limitations I doubt they can increase the prices much...
- ApolloFortyNine 2y ago
  Missing object storage kinda makes it a joke. Hetzner cloud is certainly useful for some things, but object storage is something I just assume any cloud would have in 2024. AWS launched it before EC2 even it's that valuable.
  - singhrac 2y ago
    Out of curiosity are you operating at a scale where "MinIO on a Hetzner node" isn't a viable replacement? I totally believe that's possible, just curious about the use case.
    - rad_gruchalski 2y ago
bengale 2y ago
What are the other 20% with you for? What is the benefit that your customers see in using an European cloud?
- vesinisa 2y ago
  As far as I know, the companies / service providers would love to be able tell their customers that 100% of their data is only stored and processed in the EU. It makes everything GDPR-related simpler for companies, and could be turned into a good advertisement for consumers.
- GordonS 2y ago
  I'm guessing so they can keep data of EU customers stored within the EU.
  - bengale 2y ago
    You can do that with AWS regions though.
    - TheTxT 2y ago
      The US government can still get at that data, because Amazon is still an American company. It doesn’t matter where the data actually lives.
      - sealeck 2y ago
        The US government can (and for many years did) tap the phone calls of the German chancellor; I don't think getting to data held by European cloud providers is really a big challenge for them.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        Woeps 2y ago
        Regarding the tech aspect? no. But legally it's always has been challenging. And that's where the difference lies Unrelated, I think this also happens the other way around.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mkesper 2y ago
Open Telekom Cloud has at least a great part of the functionality you expect when talking about a cloud provider: VMs (even GPU ones), VPCs, managed databases, block storage, Logging, IAM, API Gateway, Container Engine etc. https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/ https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/
- haukem 2y ago
  Open Telekom Cloud was at least in 2020 running fully on Huawei Software and hardware: https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sichere-cloud-made-in-europe https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich... Deutsche Telekom used Huaweis OpenStack implementation. I haven't found any information that this changed, so I assume it is still running completely on Huawei. At least they made sure that they still get chips from the US despite sanctions. ;-)
  - eb0la 2y ago
    Telcos fell in love with OpenStack some years ago and went all in. Biggest problem with OpenStack was you needed a lot of hardware to learn how to use it and the talent pool was quite small.
- lifestyleguru 2y ago
  I doubt anyone who was ever customer of their detail telecom services would free-willingly use any services from Telekom ever again.
  - mercora 2y ago
    agreed.
- m3adow 2y ago
  That's only on paper though. I know a couple of people who founded a startup in the medicine sector on Telekom Cloud and most of their backend engineering work in the first years(!) went into circumventing Telekom Cloud issues like slow API, servers not starting or plainly disappearing. Haven't talked to the guys for two years, so it might have improved in the meantime, but it's Telekom, so I heavily doubt it.
arkh 2y ago
> there not too much innovation required to compete Yeah, sure. This is the kind of mentality which lead us to "Cloud" being developed by an online book seller and not hosting companies. Then those hosting companies needed 10 years for open source solutions to be available to close some of the gap. Next time a random company disrupts the hosting market, it won't come from hosting companies because "there not too much innovation required to compete" and those companies will wonder what is going on.
fbn79 2y ago
From Italy there is Aruba (www.cloud.it). Not bad. But quality/price ratio worst than Hetzener I think

shortrounddev2 2y ago

The European market has always seemed like a tertiary market compared to the US and Asia. I think that's because, despite having some raw number of euros to spend on a product, the European economy has struggled since 2008 compared to the US and Asia, and huge corps which are obsessed with growth don't see an accelerating future for Europe as a customer base.

kergonath 2y ago
Europeans are mostly comfortable giving money to American companies, and there is not as much of a culture difference as with Asia, so there is no need for separate offerings specially for Europe. All big tech companies have several subsidiaries that seem to be doing quite well. It’s true that there are not as many European startups than American ones, but the market is there.
namaria 2y ago
Which creates some juicy margin niches for smart developers to make a killing as independent contractors.
dathinab 2y ago
even if it has struggled it still is a lot of purchasing power and cloud is an essential service for many companies and how things played out in recent years has created increasing insensitive to not use Amazone/Google/MS Cloud but it's marked which isn't really that visible on HN and similar US focused sites
layer8 2y ago
Is “Asia” a well-defined market? Honestly curious.
- shortrounddev2 2y ago
  No, you're right
Barrin92 2y ago
>European market has always seemed like a tertiary market compared to the US and Asia Well, this isn't even remotely accurate on the numbers. For virtually every big tech company the US is about half of the market, Europe about 30%, then ~15% Asian Pacific, and give or take a bit in the rest of the world. Given that most large tech companies are locked out of China or quickly leaving the only large country with comparable purchasing power to Europe in Asia is Japan.
- nradov 2y ago
  It's about revenue growth opportunities, not current market share. Europe in general is largely stagnant, and seems likely to trend down due to the demographic time bomb. In Asia, South Korea is already comparable to Japan as a technology market (but also stagnating). The big Asia-Pacific growth opportunities are going to be in India, Malaysia, and Philippines.
  - shortrounddev2 2y ago
    Africa will soon emerge as an important market as well, particularly Nigeria. Japan and Korea are, as you said, not only stagnating but deflating (in the case of Japan). I believe GDP actually declined in Europe recently so I think Europe will shrink as a market in the coming decades unless they can fix demographic pressures and improve entrepreneurship. The US faces similar demographic problems but we have unique solutions to those problems that means that GDP growth is stronger in the US than virtually anywhere else in the world. India is a more mature "growing economy", and at this point I think the whole world is aware of the opportunities there. As you pointed out, Malaysia and the Philippines are growing, and so are other SE asian countries like Viet Nam and Thailand (though Thailand has struggled to grow since the pandemic, it's shown good growth since 2000). Africa is the untapped market right now; Nigeria is expected to exceed 400mil (if not 500-700mil) people by 2050. I don't know as much about their economy, so I'm not sure if this growth has translated into the kind of infrastructure which would create more demand for computing services (i.e: I don't know what smartphone or 5G penetration is like there), but I would bet that if it's not ripe yet, it will be soon Europe needs to solve its demographic pressures by either accepting more non-EU immigrants or doing something to encourage women to have more children, which would require solving for the opportunity cost (i.e: career stagnating or ending) that women bear 90+% of the time they have children, as well as the FOMO issues (which I don't think government can solve)
fxtentacle 2y ago
I believe this impression is mainly because people think of France and Germany as separate countries, not as a combined EU market. Imagine if you'd compare only California against all of China, it would look like the US was in seriously bad shape.

lossolo 2y ago

Do you compete in some kind of a niche? There is OVH in EU.

RainaRelanah 2y ago
And Scaleway (Online.net/Iliad). And Hetzner.
- dathinab 2y ago
  and OTC (Open Telecom Cloud) But I wouldn't say it's a niche if you look at the size of the EU even if it "hasn't being doing that well" it's still a lot of purchasing power And especially in recent years there has been an increasing push away from US cloud providers and this somewhat evening out the playing field of "newcomers" compared to Amazone, MS, Google. Also because HN is quite US/SV focused and differences in business culture especially compared to SV about e.g. businesses doing blog post and similar you don't really see much at all from this marked on HN. But that doesn't mean it's not a big marked.
  - haukem 2y ago
    The Open Telekom Cloud was at least in the beginning running on Huawei hardware and software. Here is a press release from 2020: https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sichere-cloud-made-in-europe https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich... Title: Open Telekom Cloud – die sichere Cloud made in Europe > Im Rahmen der Innovationspartnerschaft liefert Huawei mit dem Cloud-Betriebssystem Huawei OpenStack Distribution eine zentrale Softwarekomponente der Open Telekom Cloud. English translation: Title: Open Telekom Cloud – the secure cloud made in Europe. > As part of the innovation partnership, Huawei provides a central software component of the Open Telekom Cloud with its cloud operating system, Huawei OpenStack Distribution.
    - dathinab 2y ago
      I know but AFIK they have moved await from it. Software wise they where anyway OpenStack based, which is a trusteable open source project Huawei is a major contributor to but other major contributors include AT&T, Canonical, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Intel, Red Hat, IBM. This made moving away from Huawei quite viable. Hardware wise they also moved away from Huawei, but I'm not sure if this apply to all data-centers of them. But AFIK at least some data centers are Huawei free. Or at least that is what they told some of their business partners which wouldn't have used them if they still used Huawei hardware in the data center that specific bussiness partner uses AFIK.

isoprophlex 2y ago

You're absolutely right: a huge, underserved market exists. Are you hiring? I'd love to work on a European big cloud alternative..!

stavros 2y ago

I use Hetzner cloud not because it's European, but because it's great.

elric 2y ago
Also because it's cheap.
- stavros 2y ago
  That's a bonus!
jedisct1 2y ago
Same for me with OVH and Scaleway. Way cheaper than AWS and friends, and they just work.
- temac 2y ago
  I'm using OVH and the notion of it "just working" is all relative. It's tolerable, but certainly a bit buggy, and with far less services than aws and co. It is also cheap, but given the limitations I doubt they can increase the prices much...
ApolloFortyNine 2y ago
Missing object storage kinda makes it a joke. Hetzner cloud is certainly useful for some things, but object storage is something I just assume any cloud would have in 2024. AWS launched it before EC2 even it's that valuable.
- singhrac 2y ago
  Out of curiosity are you operating at a scale where "MinIO on a Hetzner node" isn't a viable replacement? I totally believe that's possible, just curious about the use case.
  - rad_gruchalski 2y ago

bengale 2y ago

What are the other 20% with you for? What is the benefit that your customers see in using an European cloud?

vesinisa 2y ago
As far as I know, the companies / service providers would love to be able tell their customers that 100% of their data is only stored and processed in the EU. It makes everything GDPR-related simpler for companies, and could be turned into a good advertisement for consumers.
GordonS 2y ago
I'm guessing so they can keep data of EU customers stored within the EU.
- bengale 2y ago
  You can do that with AWS regions though.
  - TheTxT 2y ago
    The US government can still get at that data, because Amazon is still an American company. It doesn’t matter where the data actually lives.
    - sealeck 2y ago
      The US government can (and for many years did) tap the phone calls of the German chancellor; I don't think getting to data held by European cloud providers is really a big challenge for them.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - Woeps 2y ago
        Regarding the tech aspect? no. But legally it's always has been challenging. And that's where the difference lies Unrelated, I think this also happens the other way around.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mkesper 2y ago

Open Telekom Cloud has at least a great part of the functionality you expect when talking about a cloud provider: VMs (even GPU ones), VPCs, managed databases, block storage, Logging, IAM, API Gateway, Container Engine etc. https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/ https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/

haukem 2y ago
Open Telekom Cloud was at least in 2020 running fully on Huawei Software and hardware: https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sichere-cloud-made-in-europe https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich... Deutsche Telekom used Huaweis OpenStack implementation. I haven't found any information that this changed, so I assume it is still running completely on Huawei. At least they made sure that they still get chips from the US despite sanctions. ;-)
- eb0la 2y ago
  Telcos fell in love with OpenStack some years ago and went all in. Biggest problem with OpenStack was you needed a lot of hardware to learn how to use it and the talent pool was quite small.
lifestyleguru 2y ago
I doubt anyone who was ever customer of their detail telecom services would free-willingly use any services from Telekom ever again.
- mercora 2y ago
  agreed.
m3adow 2y ago
That's only on paper though. I know a couple of people who founded a startup in the medicine sector on Telekom Cloud and most of their backend engineering work in the first years(!) went into circumventing Telekom Cloud issues like slow API, servers not starting or plainly disappearing. Haven't talked to the guys for two years, so it might have improved in the meantime, but it's Telekom, so I heavily doubt it.

arkh 2y ago

> there not too much innovation required to compete Yeah, sure. This is the kind of mentality which lead us to "Cloud" being developed by an online book seller and not hosting companies. Then those hosting companies needed 10 years for open source solutions to be available to close some of the gap. Next time a random company disrupts the hosting market, it won't come from hosting companies because "there not too much innovation required to compete" and those companies will wonder what is going on.

fbn79 2y ago

From Italy there is Aruba (www.cloud.it). Not bad. But quality/price ratio worst than Hetzener I think