6 ms·
EU Eyes Ditching Microsoft Azure for France's OVHcloud
- justahuman74 1y agoIt's simply irresponsible for the EU to depend so heavily on the US for sovereign-critical activities
- stego-tech 1y agoSeriously. I wrote about it in March and have been banging on this particular drum since my first client demand to move wholesale into AWS. https://green.spacedino.net/software-is-not-the-service/ https://green.spacedino.net/software-is-not-the-service/ For what it's worth, said client could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price, only that it had to be done. I've seen dozens more moves since, blindly surrendering sovereignty over their own enterprise in the process. Best of luck with the EU in their migration journey. I'd love to help (and get me and my loved ones out of the US), but at the very least I'm eager to see more competition from a regime more friendly to (most) human rights.
- mistrial9 1y ago> could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price specifically, to dis-empower you and others in your guilds ? AWS will turn on and turn off with no labor negotiations, at a known market price. Admins and devs are competition to the decision makers and an unknown entity, asking market prices or more. This is predictable and it is playing out now.
- stego-tech 1y agoI mean, I know all that now; it's what kicked off my descent into the politics and ideologies I hold near and dear to me now, and revitalized my interest in technology as a means of helping humans instead of amplifying Capital. My point was, financially and logically, it made (makes) no sense. It's penny-wise and pound foolish, given how (relatively) inexpensive a VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin is nowadays compared to anyone with AWS, Azure, or GCP credentials.
- mistrial9 1y agoyes I agree, more than I can say in a short post
- mlinhares 1y agoChina is proof of that with their own universe of cloud services, there's no reason Europe can't be competitive the same way, the talent is there, it needs capital and government push.
- tonyhart7 1y agoChina is one huge economy that centrally planned + strive for sustainable themselves is not easy to achieve for EU
- slaw 1y agoChina software industry is 10 times size of Europe. It is easier when you are big.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoIt is now, yes. Would it be if the great firewall didn't exist, though?
- mlinhares 1y agoStill best for them if they develop their own industry.
- znpy 1y ago> My point was, financially and logically, it made (makes) no sense. You don't know, but you proved your customer's point, unwillingly. The thing is, your logic is flawed because it's (incredibly) shortsighted. > VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin Those three things essentially do the same thing, yet they're completely different beasts. You have to look for people knowledgeable on that specific product, and you might not find them. When dealing with AWS EC2 instances? A lot more people with standardized competencies. For companies it's just great because they can hire from a much larger pool of candidates. It's great for workers too, because they can pick my skills and go work at another company where I'll be immediately productive, meaning they'll have a much smoother onboarding process (learning the business domain rather than fighting the technology).
- immibis 1y agoAWS is also hard to administer. Sure you don't have to deal with physical hardware, but you don't at Hetzner, either.
- ranger_danger 1y agoI have never had any issues with AWS, and I don't know anyone else that has either. I'm sure some might consider it difficult, but I don't think that the vast majority do, and I don't consider that enough of a reason to blanket state that it's hard for everyone... otherwise they wouldn't be using it anyway.
- immibis 1y agoAre you using it for virtual servers or for all their serverless stuff? I've never had any issues with real servers, either. Not even a hard drive failure (touch wood). I'm sure some might consider servers difficult, but [the rest of your comment]
- freeone3000 1y agoYou still need an admin for AWS. It doesn’t actually abstract anything about services or workloads; it’s not Heroku.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoEr, so now you're on AWS and instead of paying a sysadmin to run things, you pay a DevOps Engineer™ to run things. Just because it's in The Cloud doesn't magically remove the need to manage it.
- belter 1y agoI asked specifically about this threat, to two employees of AWS and they laughed on my face. To quote Nigel Farage...I guess they are probably not laughing now....
- tonyhart7 1y ago"from a regime more friendly to (most) human rights" what is this mean??? Are you saying US is lead by dictator???
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hkpack 1y agoNot yet, but it is just irresponsible to wait with hope and prayers. Some people are just extrapolating and see that US is pregnant with authoritarianism.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mcv 1y agoIt already was before, and it's doubly true now. There's always been tension between the EU's and the US's view on privacy and data protection, and it's only getting worse.
- firesteelrain 1y agoAzure Europe is located in data centers in Norway, Germany, Netherlands, France and others. The only US sovereign services in Azure is Azure US Government. Microsoft isn’t rolling out Azure US Government in Europe. It does offer like Azure Germany in the past which is sovereign. There typically is a delay in rollout of features from US to Europe though. But you could make the same nationalist argument for their dependence on all sorts of things like Microsoft Office. They could go to LibreOffice which some places have but it doesn’t have parity with Microsoft Office Another argument could be made that Europe shouldn’t rely on places like Dell either for corporate or business PCs such as how in many sectors years ago the US stopped using Lenovo. Microsoft is still subject to US laws like the CLOUD Act. That’s the real issue policymakers are reacting to. They’re not necessarily anti-Azure; they’re pro-control over sensitive systems
- Spooky23 1y agoYou’re trusting that Microsoft is maintaining meaningful segmentation for their dozen different clouds. History suggests they do not. At best, you’re getting data residency from Microsoft. Key components, like Entra, are globally shared services.
- firesteelrain 1y agoEntra (Azure AD) is indeed a globally shared service. But Microsoft has been moving toward regional anchoring with things like the EU Data Boundary. If Europe wants full-stack control, they’ll need to build it
- immibis 1y ago[flagged]
- ranger_danger 1y ago> This is an empirically observed fact. No, this is demonstrably false. There are many entire organizations whose sole purpose is to monitor responsibilities and prepare for crises.
- belter 1y agoBoth your statement, at least in current phrasing, and the one you replied to, are correct at the same time. > Organizations like the SEC ...sole purpose is to monitor responsibilities and prepare for crises, but they could not care less...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- up-n-atom 1y agoAnother lesson to be learned is not to put all your bread in 1 basket. They should disperse between all the European providers listed and not just with OVHcloud. Like that’s the entire premise of a network.
- is_true 1y agoI've never had so many administrative issues with any other company.
- greybox 1y agoIm very happy to finally see this happen. It's so dangerous to centralize our digital services in the United States.
- firesteelrain 1y agoBut are they really not using Azure Europe?
- BartjeD 1y agoAzure Europe is one truth social post removed from a shutdown.
- firesteelrain 1y agoThat’s a dramatic oversimplification. Azure Europe runs in EU datacenters under EU laws. Microsoft’s EU Data Boundary limits access (even for US staff) It’s not as fragile as one political post bringing the whole thing down.
- BartjeD 1y agoOfcourse it is. The IT of the ICJ on MS 365 got shut off... After a truth social post. EU law means nothing when the employees are on the next plain to Washington. And when the funding and expertise and infrastructure is tightly controlled by USA entities, who'm react severely to the posts of the commander in Chief. (As would I)
- firesteelrain 1y agoInaccurate. The ICJ email issue was tied to a support contract suspension. If the EU wants full independence, that’s a fair goal, but we should be clear about what's actually happened versus what feels like it could happen.
- 1y ago
- nlitened 1y agoOnce I made an account at OVHcloud and decided to rent a server for 400 EUR/mo. My request was rejected, stating that I should try renting cheaper servers first for a few months, before my account would be allowed to rent more powerful machines.
- rozenmd 1y agoAlmost every VPS provider does this.
- 1over137 1y agoWhy?
- rozenmd 1y agofraud prevention
- mlinhares 1y agoFraud, its very likely people doing that are using stolen cards and will not pay, so the provider will be slapped with a loss for the service rendered and then a dispute on the card.
- octo888 1y agoWhy let them rent a cheaper server? What will the discover in a month or so that they don't know at the start?
- CaliforniaKarl 1y agoIt will start to build a positive reputation for the client, prompting the provider to take the greater risk.
- rustc 1y ago> What will the discover in a month or so that they don't know at the start? That at least the card they're paying with is not stolen (the real owner would start a dispute).
- rustc 1y agoAnyone have experience with OVH's VPS [1]? The prices seem to be close to Hetzner, cheaper than DigitalOcean but how is the reliability? [1]: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/vps/ https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/vps/
- ge96 1y agoI've been using them for several years now, the cheap ones anyway 1 core 2GB of RAM mostly They provide some DDOS protection and also I remember when there was a fire at a datacenter/downtime they refunded me for the down time that was nice My stuff is basic though personal sites either Apache/PHP or NGINX/NodeJS
- rtsil 1y agoI had a cheap VPS (kimsufi) with them for over 10 years and I don't remember a single downtime notification. Before that, I had another for 5 or so years and I received two notifications, but each time it was to tell me the problem has been fixed.
- dasv 1y agoWell, except for the time their datacenter caught on fire I haven't had any problems.
- tester756 1y agoI've been using cheap Linux OVH VPSes to host various .NET apps and I really recommend them. I love the payments simplicity and transparency.
- 1y ago
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoIsn't hetzner EU based?
- amazingamazing 1y agoThey should - more competitors will bring the price down.
- diamond559 1y agoThis will happen eventually as all US business are in the process of being de-facto nationalized puppets of the regime's will.
- gadflyinyoureye 1y agoCitation needed.
- noobermin 1y agoI wonder if the US tech execs are going to start regretting cosying up to the trump admin. The US is soon to isolate itself, and take them along with it which is essentially soon to be their own fault.
- eptcyka 1y agoWithout intel/amd/nvidia/ampere/qualcom what servers can one deploy? What client devices can the EU buy? Without sovereign supply chains, I personally will take US hegemons above chinese hegemons any day.
- codedokode 1y agoUS cannot even stop a single country from getting access to latest GPU.
- treesknees 1y agoIn the short term, Trump could order the immediate shutdown of cloud accounts for the EU, as exemplified in the article. While this won’t completely eliminate the EU’s reliance on American tech, as you rightly pointed out, it does reduce the risk of a sudden disconnect and initiates a long-term commitment to gradually distance itself from US tech. It’s a step in the right direction.
- eecc 1y ago“Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.” ― Voltaire https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7390459-lord-protect-me-from-my-friends-i-can-take-care https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7390459-lord-protect-me-fro...
- throw0101b 1y ago> Without intel/amd/nvidia/ampere/qualcom what servers can one deploy? Without memory or storage chips from Asian manufacturers what servers can one deploy? I think Micron is the last (?) major US-headquartered maker of these types of chips. > What client devices can the EU buy? Who makes the screens for client devices (phones, tablets, laptops, etc)? How many are American companies?
- timewizard 1y agoIs it time to renegotiate contracts? It'd be a good move to bully your way into more favorable pricing anyways.
- cynicalsecurity 1y agoI've once tried to get a VPS from OVH and my account was immediately blocked after trying to pay for it with my debit card based on who knows what reason. My card has never been rejected before. The helpdesk didn't tell me the reason saying "they don't have access to that information" (ridiculous) and I could try uploading scans of my ID to their system. They said it as if they weren't sure themselves on what I should do. Thank you, but no. I would never host anything on OVH. There are other much better hosting providers in Europe.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- firesteelrain 1y agoThere is also EU's GAIA-X project which is meant to build a federated, interoperable, and sovereign European cloud framework
- wmf 1y agoGAIA-X completely failed.
- firesteelrain 1y agoAnd this one might too. EU tends to not have the same US capital
- bayindirh 1y agoAlso there's European Processor Initiative: https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/ https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/
- rvanmil 1y agoWouldn’t it be great if this finally breaks the Microsoft stranglehold. We could pop open the champagne and toast to liberté égalité and digital sovereignty ;)
- pabs3 1y agoOther people's computers can never be digital sovereignty, even if those people are a European company.
- st3fan 1y agoYes! All they need to do is start somewhere. Pick a thing and move it into the EU. Then do the next thing. They will see it is possible.
- Canada 1y agoRemember when we used to just run servers in our own buildings? We should all do that more.
- neepi 1y agoExactly that. Rather than centralise the risks, distribute them therefore reducing them. One political change put millions of people and businesses at risk. Minimising this in future is not putting everything on someone else's computers.
- 1over137 1y agoMany of us still run servers in our own building.
- M2Ys4U 1y agoThere are pros and cons to both approaches... and it's not a mutually-exclusive position. Having some on-prem compute and some cloud compute is entirely viable.
- Canada 1y agoI agree. I just think we've gone too far with the centralization and we should bring it back to a healthy balance. The hyperscalers are no longer sharing the benefits of the economy of scale, they are milking us now, and we're also creating a very dangerous concentration of control over the internet.
- refulgentis 1y agoPresumably US-centric reactions to this stuff on other social media is 100% consistently "lol EU", other than when I'm fired up enough to make a late stage Americana quip. (Ex. This morning, buncha nonsense making fun of Macron tweet re: EU should buy France fighter jets turns to lolol omg the Frenchie surrender monkey is selling war) As a US citizen, I'd like to thank any of you imposing costs on us for how intellectually lazy & stupid we've gotten en masse. Reality intruding over and over and over is the only way things start getting better.
- samrus 1y agoThis is great. While i dont agree with the vast majority of conservative viewpoints, a nation investing in itself is definitely something we need more of People might raise the point that these native tech service providers arent as mature as the american giants. But that maturity can only be acheived through healthy local consumption. Once the EU uses them, and makes it lucrative for local competition to pop up, then they will rise to the challenge. This is great
- andy99 1y agoWhile I agree with your sentiment, it seems you've never used OVH.
- ahofmann 1y agoOvh has a lot of products. Some of them are cheap and the services quality acts accordingly. OVH is mostly pretty good.
- lossolo 1y agoCare to elaborate? I've been using their different products for around 20 years.
- tux3 1y agoOVH has been getting a lot better. They recently discovered that Terraform exists and have a usable infra as code provider now. They're starting to take multi-AZ seriously. Sometimes their network is UP and working normally, which compares favorably with us-east-1. It's starting to look like a real cloud.
- neepi 1y ago[flagged]
- tetha 1y agoThere is also this weird question: What do you get from your hoster? For example, I've had endless discussions with people about the reliability of Hetzner Dedicated Servers. At the end of the day, you have to realize: You get a physical server, with fans (we had performance degradations because a cable binder degraded and parts fell into a fan and the CPU throttled), a PSU, drives (HDDs and SDDs fail differently, but both fail. SDD failure can be much more evil). It's just a little box that can run for years, or it can choose to go kapeister whenever it wants. Maybe it will take it's friends along the way too. There have been outages of servers catching on fire and frying the systems on top of them as well. Then the fire suppression goes off and shatters some drives plates on top of that. Naturally only in the archiving servers, who'd be using spinning rust in other systems this day and age? And that's the operational technique and experience that has been hoovered up by very large PaaS offerings and hosters. You need to plan for, deal with and mitigate the situation that every server and VM hosted on a server (read: all of them) are a somewhat useful crew of saboteurs that are trying to figure out when the right failure of 3-4 systems are going to cause you a lot of overtime, stress, and maybe impact and cripple the business as well. If you plan for this, Hetzner Cloud + Dedicated can be a great hoster, with great support and really good value for money. If you assume that a single Hetzner Dedicated Server or Cloud VM has the same manpower behind it to give it the staggering uptime of EC2 instances, and you bet all of your company and all of your money on this VM never going down... well, you can do this on AWS. We've had a prolonged outage of an EC2 instance once in like 7 years. But don't do this. Fix your failovers and architecture and embrace the fun of european hosters. After some grief with the early stages of the Cloud-Dedicated-VSwitch infrastructure, we're seeing great uptime with them.
- yread 1y agoIsn't OVH Canada-based? I try to dig into who is the counterparty for important documents (like a DPA) and it was all mostly the Canadian corporation. Of course, that's still better than US, but not truely European
- faraggi 1y agono. french.
- _verandaguy 1y agoOVH is French, though it does have at least one data centre in Canada.
- yalogin 1y agoThis is a direct result of the current administration's overt animosity with Europe and every other democratic nation. EU saw that the tech CEOs are cozying up to him and probably it as a direct sign that they will be bend the knee and do whatever is asked of them. It is enough motivation to move things out. Wonder how many more countries follow suit. At the very least countries that don't have the resources/infra will want to diversify, may be.
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoThat and its inability to comprehend services exports.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoI usually enjoy reading your comments, so I wish you'd expand a bit here.
- mk89 1y agoI think he is talking about the fact that Trump is screaming left and right that "EU iS ScREwINg US CiTIzeNs" because he merely takes into account trading of physical products, without showing the full picture. Basically if you consider services as well, the trade surplus is a few million euros only, because EU imports a lot of services from USA.
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoBalance of trade is commonly calculated by only considering goods [1]. America’s trade deficit is a deficit in the trade of goods; we usually have a services trade surplus [2]. When this administration has messaged [3] and made trade policy [4], it has used that goods-only view of trade, i.e. it ignores services. Microsoft exporting Azure as a service has zero impact on how many goods America buys or sells. (If anything, it might increase the goods deficit if the servers Azure runs on, or the buildings its staff occupy, use any foreign components.) So by this administration’s accounting, the EU reducing its purchases of Azure is great if they e.g. buy two more Hershey’s bars. That’s economically nonsense, and that is the problem. [And thank you! :)] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_trade https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_trade [2] https://www.bea.gov/news/2025/us-international-trade-goods-and-services-december-and-annual-2024 https://www.bea.gov/news/2025/us-international-trade-goods-a... [3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-declares-national-emergency-to-increase-our-competitive-edge-protect-our-sovereignty-and-strengthen-our-national-and-economic-security/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr... [4] https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reciprocal-tariff-chart-2054514 https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reciprocal-tariff-chart-20545...
- physhster 1y agoI don't think OVH is anywhere near the level of AWS/GCP/Azure in terms of the quality of the infrastructure and networking. They seem to cut all the corners they can cut in pursuit of lower prices. They built a data center out of wood, with no fire suppression, and it burned down, taking businesses with it: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/ovhclouds-data-center-fire-one-year-on-what-do-we-know/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/ovhclouds-dat...
- dwroberts 1y ago> They seem to cut all the corners they can cut in pursuit of lower prices. You might want to contrast with Azure's recent security record. Microsoft is letting it seriously slide
- AndroTux 1y agoAgreed. It's laughable how many incidents OVH has on a monthly basis. That being said, I'm all for the EU using EU products, and hopefully it only means OVH gets better over time.
- bravesoul2 1y agoMight be a feature. A chaos monkey. What do you do when your provider is like this: use a second cloud for resilience.
- physhster 1y agoFor cheap bulk compute, it's probably ok, but where would you serve your actual critical prod from?
- whynotmaybe 1y agoYou're right, it's not anywhere where the major US cloud vendors are. Microsoft isn't much better : https://www.geekwire.com/2018/microsoft-releases-details-last-weeks-big-azure-outage-servers-damaged-no-data-lost/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/microsoft-releases-details-las... I remember losing access to azure devops, even though it was hosted in Canada, because Microsoft didn't have a backup domain controller elsewhere than in their datacenter in Texas. I'm sure OVH learned from this event and will use EU's investment to improve everything.
- imperio59 1y agoI used OVH years ago when "the cloud" wasn't a thing. Always super reliable. Always super pro. You love to see good competition in this type of market.
- fakedang 1y agoWhile we're at this, I also want to add that it's an absolute travesty that a company like SAP has stopped offering onprem licenses and is now hosting their stuff only on AWS, GCP or Azure (and pushing hard for it).
- nickdothutton 1y agoI understand the sentiment but would lay money on them being on MS, Google, or AWS within 5 years.
- heraldgeezer 1y agoOVH is not comparable to Azure... at all. Does OVH have intune-like service? Cloud DBs? Office 365 runs on Azure.
- pier25 1y agoWhy OVH? It's one of the biggest hosting companies in the world (probably the biggest in Europe) but it doesn't have exactly the best reputation.
- wigster 1y agotrump has probably cost the big US hosts 100s of billions. no one can trust them going forward
- adamcharnock 1y agoThis is something we're [1] seeing a lot of interest in. I wouldn't say it is the driving factor, but it is a driving factor that's giving quite a lot of companies the incentive to finally push the 'Leave AWS (et al)' button. Even so, two of the major hurdles we see companies facing are: 1. Skills/Training/Hiring – Converting a staff of engineers familiar with AWS/Azure/etc to a new provider isn't necessarily straightforward. 2. Migration & disruption – Untangling one's integration with AWS/Azure/etc, finding and testing replacement services, planning the migration, executing on the migration. All this can cause disruption and delays in actually working on what's important. What we do is provide multi-AZ bare-metal Kubernetes deployments onto EU providers (we default to Hetzner, but are flexible, and can do on-prem). As part of this we: a) include monthly DevOps engineering time dedicated to each client, and b) handle the migration planning and execution. We're really trying to help companies (particularly SMEs & startups) make the jump. We try to mitigate the skills issue by providing actual engineers integrated with your team. We try to minimise the disruption by handling the migration in parallel to ongoing development cycles/sprints. If anyone wants to know more you can reach me at adam@ domain. I hope this was interesting and not too much of a pitch. [1]: https://lithus.eu https://lithus.eu
- neepi 1y agoHey lets lock ourselves into a different cloud solution. What happened to organisations being the sovereign entities not national tied clouds?
- dsign 1y agoI simply can't understand how, for anything critical, can anybody rely on somebody that makes Microsoft Teams and Windows 11. It sounds like the EU is getting a little bit of common sense.
- aktuel 1y agoI guess Microsoft walking around with its flap open and dangling Azure's masterkey hasn't helped either.
- moralestapia 1y agoWhat a giant mistake to make this public. (I'm not referring to Euractiv but to whoever the sourve is). They have nothing to gain and only gave a heads-up to Microsoft.
- sharpshadow 1y agoMany European companies will follow.
- bravesoul2 1y agoBuy OVH? Opinions? Price to revenue 2.6. pe quite high about 150
- oncallthrow 1y agoOVH is even worse than Azure
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pabs3 1y agoThey should switch to self-hosting instead.