16 ms·
Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
- fnoef 8mo agoI keep seeing over and over how Europe should be self sufficient. I’d be happy for Europe to be self sufficient. But the truth is that Europe does not have the infrastructure and offering to be self sufficient. Even looking at basic things like AWS SES, there is no European offering. Apart from scaleway, there are no competitions for big cloud providers. There are no alternative to office suites. And I’m not even talking about hardware. What’s the point to build data centers if they run US made hardware. So, as the saying goes: talk is cheap, show me the software.
- thethimble 8mo agoPerhaps there should be an EU committee to draft a mandate for a working group tasked with identifying the necessary stakeholders for a preliminary report on digital infrastructure.
- tene80i 8mo agoPerhaps instead there should be a president enriching himself and insulting citizens executed by his goons.
- tonymet 8mo ago> I'm an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn't trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money. Under our current government, we're simply not trustworthy. Thank you Redditor, you must have forgotten about the Patriot Act and how every President since has only worsened Privacy at home and abroad (we could easily go back to the 60s, and beyond). Remember CableGate, Prism, FISA Courts, or 3 dozen other Privacy violating programs? Yes it all started with Trumpoldemort, lest we say his name.
- zkmon 8mo agoA story I read goes thus: A nicely dressed young man was waiting at a bus stop in a rural part of India. He need go to a nearby city. Suddenly clouds gathered and it started to pour down heavily. He took shelter in a chai (tea) shed beside the bus stop. The chaiwala (tea shop owner) announced that the bus is cancelled for the day as road was damaged due to the heavy rain. The young man looked worried and tried to go by walk in the rain. Chaiwala warned that rain would get only heavier. Young man returned and sat back. Other people ordered more chai. Due to more demand for chai, the chai jar (tea granules) got empty. Chaiwala commanded the worker boy to run to a shop that is half-mile away and get more chai packs. The boy sprinted out as if there was no rain. He came back in half hour, fully soaked, starry-eyed, with tea packs in his hand. Young man gets up and starts walking out. Chaiwala was shouting that winds and rain are going to persist the whole day. Young man didn't listen, and didn't feel the rain.
- ta9000 8mo agoAmericans are absolutely not a fan of this administration and it will be severely neutered after the midterms. The Supreme Court is already doing some of that. Americans are not your enemy, Washington (state), California, Illinois, etc (AKA the states with real economic power and all the tech companies) did not vote for this. We still believe in the rule of law and our friendships with our allies.
- tj-teej 8mo agoAfter Snowden's leaks don't we know the levels of spying that's already happening today? That was a decade ago, what has changed?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- epolanski 8mo agoMost of my European clients fall in two categories: 1. Ain't nobody got time/care to move out of AWS/azure but we can consider alternatives on new stuff. 2. We moving all to European cloud vendors and gonna mail them to ditch US hardware as well. The first group is bigger than the second. One wish to say trump has done damage, but he was voted and he's doing exactly what he said he would do so it's hard to treat this as "it's just trump", it's not, it's Americans treating others like enemies.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- madhacker 8mo agoGood for the EU. This a a much needed wake-up call for data sovereignty.
- zmmmmm 8mo agoIt's not practical IMHO to move out of US owned cloud companies at this point in time. It could become so over years. However what is mostly practical is to avoid building on their proprietary layers and stick to relatively portable tech. Just treat it like highly flexible servers / generic services provisioned through APIs. It's a battle to stop "cloud experts" from cargo culting "best practices" which invariably involve everything they can find at the extreme end of the proprietary stack.
- rm30 8mo agoI've carefully read this interesting discussion: some political, mostly about full cloud services (AWS) vs partial EU providers, or lock-in vs indipendence. I think the problem is elsewhere. The real advantage of big cloud players isn't their individual services. It's seamless integration and simplicity. We need a service integration standard for infrastructure that enables: - Service discovery - Networking - Observability - Configuration This benefits everyone: EU companies, US startups, enterprises anywhere avoiding vendor lock-in. A standard letting services integrate regardless of who provides them. Not just container orchestration (Kubernetes), but something working across bare metal, VPS, containers, and remote machines.
- hoppp 8mo agoI really hope so. I am working on a high availability postgres self-hosting solution that works with hetzner ,just for the Eu market. Fingers crossed, lots of work ahead.
- adrianN 8mo agoI kind of share the opinion of the FSF Europe that it is less important where software comes from compared to whether it’s libre, but for cloud hardware I really hope that we manage to create competitive European offerings. Maybe we’re lucky and this European initiative will produce more than five Fraunhofer institutes and a gift to SAP.
- nubinetwork 8mo agoI thought I heard that hetzner was pretty cheap, haven't looked myself though...
- adrianN 8mo agoPrice is probably not the only factor in competitiveness.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo agoWell Hetzner's support's phenomenal too. Sure they might not have all the same offerings but they are really easy to abstract upon and personally I feel like hetzner is seriously one of the best cloud providers. Hetzner is absolutely 10x more competitive than AWS. It's actually hard to match the competitiveness of hetzner with their scale actually. I seriously can't understate this enough but AWS being competitive is really somewhat of a mass delusion or maybe the fact that Companies don't know other alternatives exist but I genuinely find it absolutely strange. Also, just go ahead and try hetzner and see their competitiveness out for yourself. Seriously, one of the best (netcup another german hosting is really great too and they can be even cheaper at times and its something I personally use and can vouch for both netcup/hetzner)
- matt-p 8mo agoThey are OK but I would not have them as my /only/ cloud.
- mark_l_watson 8mo agoI have used Hetzner off and on for years, nice products and services. I don’t care what provider you use, if your business or app use case needs any sort of reliability have a plan for reinstalling code and data on alternate providers quickly as possible. There are horror stories of people and companies being cut off because of pressure from the US government, or having one of the Google/Microsoft/Amazon tech giants cancelling accounts. Really, in today’s world, why totally rely on anyone? EDIT: it seems prudent to maintain a cloud account in Europe, US, and Asia and have a plan for moving application code and data around if required. Outside the US I have mostly only used Hetzner, but Alibaba has impressive looking services.
- bell-cot 8mo agoYes, nice, true. But sadly, it feels like pigs will be singing Handel's Messiah before Europe's leaders get off their fat asses and actually do anything about their problems.
- abc123abc123 8mo agoWhy should they do something about it? They are not IT people. If you want to switch, do it today. Plenty of options exist. If you designed yourself into a corner by utilizing function as a service to program agains ta proprietary API, then you can just as well start from scratch or quit and join a company that knows how to avoid lock-in.
- bell-cot 8mo ago> The are not IT people. They are not farmers - but it's their job to make sure that their countries have secure supplies of safe food, long-term. They are not electricians - but it's their job to make sure that their countries have... They are not soldiers - but it's their job to make sure... The are not ... ... (Yes, I suspect that we have rather different concepts of the role of gov't, and the responsibilities of gov't leaders.)
- jgbuddy 8mo agoThus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data. Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them? This article is more political than logical or technical, it’s unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive.
- reorder9695 8mo agoI wonder if someone could make a foss frontend for Google Drive/Dropbox/<insert product here> that transparently encrypts files on your device before uploading them, that would certainly make me worry less about those services.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago> unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive I don't think most Europeans want a laissez faire-style "anything goes" market, we want corporations and people to have responsibility for what they do and the effect they have. With a little bit of nuance, some government control and intervention is needed in a healthy society, because we don't want to end up in the same situation the US currently finds itself in.
- jgbuddy 8mo ago
- andersa 8mo agoThis will happen automatically once an EU native cloud exists with comparable pricing. Get on it. No one will pay 10x to store data in Europe.
- simianparrot 8mo ago[flagged]
- throwaway09809 8mo agoYour HN handle is a good fit for your comment
- simianparrot 8mo agoIt’s tongue-in-cheek given how AI-bros seem to think human intelligence is no different from the function of an LLM. At least I’m not hiding behind throwaway accounts.
- atoav 8mo agoAh the good old unelected bureaucrat-myth. And then you check and the very (usually right wing) politicians rallying against the bureaucrats voted for this or that regulation themselves.
- simianparrot 8mo agoI'm not right-wing. I'm also not left wing. I don't care what said politicians did. I'm talking about how no EU member country's populace gets a vote in who rules over them from Brussels.
- deaux 8mo agoComplete, utter bullshit. There are maybe 4 countries in the world with significantly less dependence on US tech. Out of those 4, one has magnitudes more government interference, another one has even more rules and regulations - including even stricter data privacy laws than GDPR - than the EU, the third has slightly less than the EU but also the lowest local tech % our of the 4, and the last one is Russia. But sure, it's the rules and regulations that are the problem. If you have any knowledge on the topic I don't need to name the other three. Talking software as that's the discussion here, not hardware.
- willtemperley 8mo agoThis poses a fundamental problem for many SaaS providers. How can you guarantee client data aren't sent across the pond when all the app state is held server-side? The answer is obvious with native apps, where it's standard practice to provide server endpoint details, so client-verified data locality is simple. I don't really know how this is practically possible in SaaS web apps.
- iLoveOncall 8mo agoEurope will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay. If you work for GCP or AWS in Europe, you'll easily get twice as much income as if you do the exact same job for Hetzner or OVH. You can't build equivalents to GCP and AWS without paying the same. I work for a FAANG right now in Europe and I wouldn't consider even a single second any European cloud provider as potential employers.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago> Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay. Stop focusing on the absolute number of "$/year", and things will make more sense. Seemingly you'll be able to live a more lavish life in Spain given 1/4 of the salary compared to FAANG, yet your life is better and you can afford more. Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.
- mgh95 8mo ago> Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life. Senior SWE salaries I'm finding in a quick google search in Spain are 80k eur. According to levels.fyi [1] Google (and presumably the other clouds) are paying 170k eur. The comparison isn't even "is 4x the salary better in the US?" it's "is 2x the salary better in the same place?" which is obviously yes. [1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-engineer/locations/spain?country=226 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
- embedding-shape 8mo agoAgain, by focusing solely on the salary you're missing the bigger picture. I know y'all are conditioned to just focusing on the salary, but there is so much more to life.
- 8mo ago
- abc123abc123 8mo agoThis already happened. Hetzner, OVH, and countless other local cloud companies exist. It is only the path of least resistancd and market inertia, that stops companies from switching. I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.
- atmosx 8mo agoComparing 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.
- RobotToaster 8mo agoThe Zastava doesn't have a bunch of superfluous computers that track you, is easy to service, and reliable?
- pjerem 8mo agoExcept 95% of companies have no need of ultra scalable super cloud. If you are a very big SaaS company that is not Google or Apple, you are probably serving hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of unique users. AWS may be convenient, but you don't /need/ it, you can build an infrastructure that will handle such workload with any of the big european providers. You'll just lose in comfort what you'll gain in data sovereignty and infrastructure costs. I worked for a 7M€ MRR company that had maybe a million of users who used the software every day. The thing ran on a dozen of OVH servers, including multi-site redundancy.
- omnimus 8mo agoExactly. AWS proposition was much more alluring where compute was more expensive and it required yearly estimations and updates. In times when one physical server can have 32, 64 or even 96 cores... you pack your own little datacenter right there and it's pretty cheap to simply overkill it, have one or two servers for redundancy and bye. So many businesses will happily run from 4 core 10usd VPS (that would have been beefy server 20 years ago).
- alecco 8mo agoSadly the EU leadership is a bunch of professional bureaucrats living in a comfy bubble completely disconnected with the people or reality.
- xoac 8mo agoAs opposed to.. the harsh realities of the Bay Area tech scene?
- alecco 8mo agoI'm not happy with the upcoming techno-feudalism, but a bunch of (mostly) un-elected lawyers and economists have no clue on how to build cloud. And it's not that they want to help EU citizens, they just want to be techno-feudal lords themselves. Or worse, more like CCP.
- nullsanity 8mo agoI think reductionist opinions about the "Free market" and price competition being the only factor are naive. Culture and trust are major components of a project, and cultural sensibilities and development culture can be a part of procurement decisions. I worked for a company that chose Tresorit over any other option because it gave them Data Sovereignty, E2E encryption, and most important, it was not American. There is intrinsic value in being "Not made in America" and data sovereignty is a major issue for a lot of organizations. Just as an American company would be concerned about storing their data in China, the rest of the world is/should be concerned about storing their data in the US.
- mytailorisrich 8mo agoWe 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.
- jfengel 8mo agoAnd for a lot of cases, that's ok. The world is a connected place, and it's more economically efficient for that. You work best when you trust your friends. You balance self reliance, according to your best judgment. It's sure worrying to watch a good friend become an enemy. But you won't fix that by swearing off friends entirely.
- mytailorisrich 8mo agoThis means exactly nothing in relation to my comment, but that and the bare downvotes are actually a good illustration of my point about manufacturing consent.
- kergonath 8mo ago> 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. It’s on purpose. The whole construct is full of feedback mechanisms that make it physically impossible. So yes, for a French company using Hetzner is a bit more risky than OVH, but not that much, and either of those are much better than Azure or AWS. The big countries all have projects for national infrastructure for things like defense and taxes. In these cases everything needs to be directly controlled by the state and it makes sense to use a local company. Most of the time that would be companies you’ve never heard of. For random users in the EU, it does not matter because all big service providers will be following the same regulations.
- barnacs 8mo agoAs if the surveillance and regulation by the unelected EU bureaucrats was any better for the European citizens...
- ndr42 8mo agoEven if you are right and everything is the same regarding surveillance and regulation: there are other important aspects that make the move to move european data out of the US worthwhile.
- barnacs 8mo ago> other important aspects like what?
- ndr42 8mo agoI will just provide 2 examples, but you can find a lot more. If your data is in the hands of a nation that uses this to block you from your data you should do something about it. [1] If your data is in the hands of a nation whose representatives are threatening your territorial integrity (greenland) you should find alternatives. [1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-s-email-block-a-wake-up-call-for-digital-sovereignty-10387383.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-s-emai...
- barnacs 8mo agoRight, but next time your data may be threatened by some European idiot rather than one from the US. To quote from my other comment: > In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner. And for that, we need education, not regulation.
- ndr42 8mo agomaybe, but education won‘t solve the issues I outlined above. So in interest of european security I‘m all for regulation of this.
- debugnik 8mo ago> 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.
- BSDobelix 8mo ago>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.
- debugnik 8mo agoI'm personally very aware of that, and I wish Europeans dropped our collective tech-inferiority complex, but I'm currently a junior at a large corpo and that's not even my business branch; I can't steer it.
- vander_elst 8mo agoI 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...
- kioku 8mo ago> 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.
- paradox460 8mo agoIt's not just big, it's large
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- eiiot 8mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pr8xnNi7OM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pr8xnNi7OM
- hintymad 8mo agoYeah, human brain is amazing. After I reading many AI replies, this kind style just stands out, even though I can't precisely describe it.
- MagicMoonlight 8mo agoWe’re the blade runners of this generation, spotting the replicants in the posts.
- tarsinge 8mo agoTo me it is simply good writing, the kind that is found in literature, but feels a bit out of place in discussions on the internet. What makes it stand out is that real English speaker on the internet are way more casual in their writing. I’ve also noticed that non native English speaker are sometimes mistaken for LLMs due to these less casual sentences structure.
- 8mo ago
- sunshine-o 8mo agoIf Europe wants to reach digital independence it really has to look at thew big picture. 1. European banks mostly sell debt and Nasdaq/Magnificent 7 stocks to their clients. This is what EU citizen invest in. 2. Data centers run on semiconductors made in Asia and cheap energy. Software is almost "the easy part". 3. The whole migration to "the Cloud" (aka MS/AWS/Google), CAPEX to OPEX transition during the ZIRP era was a scam sold by the same ruling class that now tell you need to revert to the previous model. 4. Human capital has to be considered. Having big consulting shops making banks on exploiting foreigners is not a sustainable path to build digital independence (see the content of the recent trade deal with India, an US and Russia ally).
- ArtTimeInvestor 8mo agoCan Europe build AI datacenters though? Europe has no wafer production and no companies that produce GPUs. That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for GPU design. Then there is the question wether there is a will to invest. Gemini gives me this list of publicly traded companies in the US and what they invested in AI infrastructure in 2025: Amazon: $100B Alphabet: $90B Microsoft: $80B Meta: $70B Tesla: $20B For Europe, I get this list: Deutsche Telekom: $1B
- fweimer 8mo agoAren't Mali GPUs designed in Europe?
- enoeht 8mo agoASML & IMEC are European.
- smallnix 8mo agoIsn't every AI datacenter chip manufacturer critically dependent on EU (ASML)?
- ninkendo 8mo agoSure but the US isn’t vowing to eliminate all dependencies on EU goods. (Just burning all their good will.)
- raincole 8mo agoI mean, if after three years all we got is Mistral, it's obvious that EU is out of the current round of AI race. It might even be a positive thing. If the AI 'bubble' bursts they might end up saving tons of money and can buy idle GPUs at a discount.
- malka1986 8mo agoYeah and we could run kimi. Th issue is energy, we should keep building nuclear reactor and renewable to power it.
- carlosjobim 8mo agoI see this differently. For European citizens and companies the safest option will always be to have their data in the USA or anywhere where European rulers cannot touch it. The same for Americans, their data should be safest far away from their government.
- cindyllm 8mo ago[dead]
- purkka 8mo agoThe Europeans have already cooperated with Americans so that each could read each other's citizens' private messaging which would be illegal for the locals. Keeping the data overseas by design would just make this easier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield
- rvnx 8mo agoFinally, this is the comment I was looking for. If you are in France you may benefit from having your data outside of France unless it's really safe stuff (e.g. a website about your dog) and no user-generated content. Because, if they seize your server for a case A, and they see evidence for case B, they can charge you for B, C, D, E... Of course the government, public policy, police and intelligence folks are going to tell you: "yes yes don't worry, bring your data here, it'll be safer with us. Don't put it in countries like Russia or China where they do not cooperate." We talk about the country (France!) which already requires you to give your ID card or take a selfie of your face to be permitted to look at porn sites. In a few months you will have to give your ID to access Discord, Meta, X, etc, and in September 2026 giving ID will be mandatory to subscribe to VPNs. (and yes technically these services can't be blocked, but once they'll threaten you or the operators of such services with jail and big fines it will be difficult to resist). If your server is in Russia or China, well, good luck, so many traps during the procedure that unless it is really important, the French authorities are going to give up. Russia doesn't care about non-Russian stuff, China the same, if you own a small clone of X for example, you are much safer there, and it is easier to operate. The only thing is that you have to make more frequent backups, as the things are less reliable there, so you can move somewhere else.
- 202508042147 8mo agoAs 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. And yes, I can use an app to pay, but whenever I rent a car or purchase something online, I still use one of these two American companies. Why isn't the European Commission mandating these app payments in different EU countries to connect with each other? Wouldn't that go faster than the digital euro, that is set to come no earlier than 2029?
- bluecalm 8mo ago>>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 it's popular) but entering more markets is like pulling teeth because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step. >> Why isn't the European Commission mandating these app payments in different EU countries to connect with each other? Wouldn't that go faster than the digital euro, that is set to come no earlier than 2029? It would but then their non-local alternative could win which they really don't want to happen.
- yoavm 8mo ago> 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 it's popular) but entering more markets is like pulling teeth because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step. That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense? How did Visa & Mastercard manage to go through the "protectionism of EU countries" then?
- bell-cot 8mo ago> How did Visa & Mastercard manage... I'd bet a combination of: - Got through before the red tape ramparts were nearly as thick as today - Ungentle arm-twisting by the US Gov't... at Visa & Mastercard's behest - Amply greased palms... which can't be traced to Visa or Mastercard. At least not in any jurisdiction which would do anything about it.
- 202508042147 8mo agoLast 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.
- fdgfikgfv 8mo agoThis is happening in the US firms too. Yesterday, our CTO asked us to look into multi-cloud solutions. We know it is politically motivated decision with no cost savings or benefit.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- embedding-shape 8mo ago> 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.
- new23d 8mo agonetim.com has been reliable over the years for me
- 202508042147 8mo agoBest would be to research a local one where you live. Support your community while you're at it!
- embedding-shape 8mo agoI live in a town with 10K other folks, I feel like I'd know if there was a local DNS registrar here :) But maybe I should be the change I wanna see!
- BSDobelix 8mo agoIt's called the Cloud Act. If your business wants to keep its production secrets and personal data safe, think again. This has nothing to do with Trump. Don't fall for the trick of using an AWS EU sovereignty cloud. Amazon is US-based and falls under the Cloud Act. Don't be tricked.
- antirez 8mo agoTo really understand how complicated is this matter, put into the mix that before AI in Europe there was no shortage of knowledge to have all our cloud services (to the point that a decent part of key infrastructure software is developed in Europe or mainly by Europeans), social networks, ..., but yet it was never strongly wanted. To reach this point, something is really odd with the current US-EU tensions.
- llmthrow0827 8mo agoEU countries are just vassal states of the USA in practice, anyway. If Uncle Sam wants that data, he's getting it, either by asking politely or by taking it. And the EU countries can't and won't retaliate.
- alansaber 8mo agocan't wait for my european incorporated company to run on my european cloud servers so I can run my european language models (which will run inference on european english)
- hunglee2 8mo agoThe time for Great Firewall of Europe was 2005, when Friendster, Skype, Xing were still a thing. Probably too late now but effort still needs to be made. One upside of a sovereign European Internet is an ecosystem which may sustain thousands of well paying jobs
- hagbard_c 8mo agoGreat Firewall? Is that where you think we - Europeans, Americans, anyone living in what used to be called the 'free world' - should go, just follow the Chinese and North Korean and similar regimes in restricting access to whatever those in control deem to be appropriate? Do you even realise what you're proposing here? We in what used to be called the 'free world' used to revel in our freedom of movement, our freedom of thought, freedom on conscience, religion and more. We used to look at places where such freedoms were not a given like they were and to a large extent still are here. The Chinese 'Great Firewall' was seen in the same light as the Berlin Wall: a means to keep an oppressive regime in power, to keep the citizenry of China unaware of anything the regime did not want them to know about so they could mow them down at Tienanmen Square without people outside of the area learning about it. Now there's some HN user claiming that Europe should also build one - why exactly? What is it that we Europeans should not be allowed to access? Why should the European Commission - maybe I should start calling them the European Commissars - have such power over Europeans? I say no to any such proposal and will, just like the Chinese, find a way around any such tool of oppression.
- hunglee2 8mo agoIt is 2026 and you still speak of the 'free world'. I give you credit for at least using doubt quotes.
- hagbard_c 8mo agoHow otherwise would you refer to 'The West' which used to be called 'the free world' other than by stating this? Why, then, do you claim I 'speak of the free world'? History does not change by choosing to ignore it. We in 'The West' used to think of ourselves as 'the free world' and to a large extent there was truth to this claim when comparing 'us' with people behind the Iron Curtain and communist China. Once the wall was broken, the borders opened and the Soviet Union dissolved this ceased to be true. By and large we're still better off than e.g. people in Russia but in many ways it seems like the bad ideas from places like the Soviet Union and China are being implemented at large scale in many countries on the west side of the former Iron Curtain. So yes, I will keep on referring to these countries in this way, 'used to be called the free world' because this is how those countries did refer to themselves. History matters, it is there to be learned from.
- niemandhier 8mo agoFor most medium sized business or government agencies, the main reason for cloud providers is that you don’t need the in-house skill. You can replicate most of their offerings for that target group with open source stuff easy enough, but you will need people to maintain that and those are more expensive.
- gregman1 8mo agoI’d start with govs. Governments are mostly running Microsoft. Like your and your friends and family’s health, tax, ownership, pension and other data.
- oellegaard 8mo agoThis! I'm Danish and everything in the government is Microsoft. USA is trying to make a hostile takeover of Greenland, a part of the Danish Kingdom, and meanwhile the parliament is migrating to Azure. I hope someone in the government wakes up soon before it's too late.
- retinaros 8mo agoeurope is doing well enough to hinders freedom. we don't need america for that. just at the moment in france they voted law to restrict social media from teenagers. that will require ID for loging onto websites. one can already guess whats the next step. the minister in charge of this already mentionned trying to ban VPN like in north korea. European governements WILL take your data from "sovereign" clouds
- ptero 8mo agoA much better goal would be to ditch dependence on a single company and become, as much as possible, cloud provider agnostic. Not that I mind giving US big tech grief -- they earned it in spades. But if you wrestle your technology chains from one evil master, do not willingly give it to another, even if he looks more benevolent today. My 2c.
- oellegaard 8mo agoWe recently moved two companies from AWS to Scaleway which is the closest to AWS you find in EU AFAIK. It's like AWS 5-10 years ago, eg much fewer managed services and you don't have as much tooling, but it works great and it is also cheaper. You do get managed kubernetes, Postgres and Redis plug and play though.
- vasco 8mo agoAnd move to the Lidl cloud?
- hsuduebc2 8mo agoIf China can and will do it, it is naive to assume other superpowers with their own interests, especially when they have convenient access to your data, would not do the same. More likely in country when business is so tightly interconnected with politics.
- lucasRW 8mo agoWhy EU-native rather than nation-native ? If you are French, your sensitive stuff must be French-native, just like Switzerland does, not "EU-native whatever that means". There is no EU, each country has very strong different interests, on some topics, some will decide to stay close to the US, on some other topics, some will seek proximity with the BRICS, etc, etc. Constantly being in an in-between is what has destroyed Europe.
- surgical_fire 8mo ago> There is no EU > what has destroyed Europe. Hyperbole much? I think you completely misunderstand what the EU is, the position of its member states, etc. It's hard to take any point you tried to make seriously given that.
- lucasRW 8mo agoMany EU countries have bought US fighter jets (Denmark for instance). Many EU countries still make it clear that they want US technology (Poland for instance). Germany is sending extremely mixed signals. So, when it's "EU sovereignity", which is it, the Polish flavored one, or the French-flavored one ?
- surgical_fire 8mo ago> Many EU countries have bought US fighter jets (Denmark for instance). This is more related to NATO than to EU. > So, when it's "EU sovereignity", which is it, the Polish flavored one, or the French-flavored one ? EU is not a country. Each country within the EU has its own government, and sometimes they exist in tension and are redundant with the bloc. It is actually a point in favor of a more federalized EU. Each individual country in isolation is too ineffective on its own.
- lucasRW 8mo agoNo. "Stronger together" is a hoax, and is only true if all participants are in agreement, otherwise you are "weaker together". 20 years of failed projects (apart from the law saying that bottles should have their cap attached) show that it is impossible to reach consensus with 27 participants. Put 27 people in a room, all wanting something different, nothing comes out.
- jmyeet 8mo agoIMHO Europe has one choice, and it may already be too late, and that is to adopt the China model or to descend into fascism and neoliberal economic collapse. Europe needs to be responsible for its own security and needs its own versions of all the big American tech companies. This administration has done more to destroy American soft power than any other in history and it's not even close. The US has shown itself to be an unreliable partner. China now has a record of decades of long-term planning and choosing the interests of its populace over corporate interests. It's not problem free by any means but the food is cheap and plentiful, the priority for housing is availability rather than treating it purely as an investment vehicle, infrastructure such as robust public transit is a priority and from the beginning of the Internet age, China has decided not to be beholden to American tech companies so there are Chinese versions of everything. One may question Europe's ability to innovate in tech given the comparative lack of unicorns produced (vs the US) but that's irrelevant here, for two reasons: 1. Europe doesn't need to innovate. It just needs to copy; and 2. Forcing EU governments and companies to use European platforms will create a captive market.
- ExoticPearTree 8mo agoI 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 Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering. Today, if for political reasons some EU companies will switch to whatever Europe has to offer in terms of cloud computing, they will need to spend a significant amount of money to retool their day to day pipelines and invest into developing or replacing cloud services with alternatives from the new provider or self-host if there is no native offering. There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look.
- cteiosanu 8mo agoIt didn't make sense to have a Tier 1 cloud providers. EU using US tech and services was the social contract for the ally level cooperation. The moment this relationship goes towards the adversary level Tier 1 cloud and the rest of dependencies (and defense/ will be developed in house, no matter if the future administration is a Dems one. The point to take away is the change of direction in the EU as slow and as costly as that might be. Now it's a security issue.
- amunozo 8mo agoI am no expert but making an office suite seems like a joke compared to getting the hardware to replicate the cloud providers, which should be imo the first priority.
- dethos 8mo ago> I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. You don't need all of that. You can go a long way with the basics, and those are well covered.
- mihaaly 8mo ago> it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering Jesus Crist and all the saints! How bad it was before getting in par with MS then?! If it is now as bad as MS?
- albert_e 8mo agoAWS seems to have seen the writing on the wall and has already launched a European Soverign Cloud -- a separate partition like they have for GovCloud and China. I am guessing other hyperscalers must be doing the same? Are we seeing a strong aversion among EU companies to use these offerings from US firms (AWS, Google, Microsoft) and viable competition emerging from Europe? The selling point of many offerings from current market leaders is that they have the widest array of services especially easy to expand into say datalake, BI or AI/ML experiments and production workloads starting from a core IaaS only setup one might have after migrating off own datacenter. I wonder if there are lesser known players positioning themselves in this space -- with managed services in platform/application space. Curious to know some examples.
- deaux 8mo agoEveryone talking about rules and regulations being a blocker to EU software sovereignty is completely clueless. Unfortunately a lot of these people are actually European but they've drank the decades of US koolaid. There are about 200 countries in this world. 195 of them are as of today reliant on foreign-controlled software to a similar degree, which is "completely and utterly in every facet, across consumer, business and government levels". Let's talk about the other 4 then (excluding the US), with varying degrees. One of them has magnitudes more government interference than the EU. Another one also has both more government interference and stricter rules and regulations, both in terms of labor laws and things like data privacy - even stricter than GDPR. The third one has less of this, but still much more of it than the US, and has the lowest sovereignty level out of the four. I've talked about three, that leaves the fourth. The fourth one is Russia.
- dbuxton 8mo agoI played this in my head a few times and don’t get it. I assume we are talking - China - maybe South Korea? - US (or is US not one of the 4?) - Russia (ok this is explicit) I think there might be an interesting idea in here but there is some confusion that’s stopping it coming out Can someone enlighten me?
- deaux 8mo agoYou're completely right, I mistakenly left out the US so I'm going to edit it in. If you include the US, it's five. The first two are of course trivially correct. I'm leaving them unnamed in the hope that those who write all-knowingly about this topic yet can't instantly name them might realize they don't know much about software sovereignty in the first place. The third one is definitely a notch lower than the others, as I noted. But still IMO noticeably higher than the other 196. The point still stands if you don't count them.
- mark_l_watson 8mo agoThat was a good article, I don’t usually read The Register. Even as a US citizen, I say: good for Europe! The world is simply a better place when countries have independence and can be as self reliant as possible. In the US media there is an ongoing rhetoric that everything in the US is wonderful and everything in the rest of the world is much worse. I am privileged to have travelled widely so I know what a mostly wonderful and friendly world we live in. I just use a few EU tech products (Hetzner, Proton, Mistral) but they seem good enough to me.
- christophilus 8mo ago> The world is simply a better place when countries have independence and can be as self reliant as possible. I would tend to agree, but to take the other side: This also gives rise to massive wars. You don’t tend to go to war when your economy is so intertwined that war is the economic equivalent of a mass casualty event.
- magicalhippo 8mo ago> You don’t tend to go to war when your economy is so intertwined that war is the economic equivalent of a mass casualty event. That is after all the core motivation[1] behind what became[2] the European Union: The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes, not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230516193200/http://aei.pitt.edu/43776/1/A7519.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20230516193200/http://aei.pitt.e... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Commun...
- mark_l_watson 8mo agoI can also agree with the ‘other side’ viewpoint as well. There are things to do to mitigate war though besides interlocking infrastructure: young people studying abroad, travel, friendships with people in other countries. Not too far off topic: a US war planner during world war 2 took Yokohama off the list of Japanese cities to be annihilated with bombing because he and his wife visited that city and loved it. Anything that fights against dehumanizing people in other countries during times of conflict is a good thing.
- jonplackett 8mo agoEven if we get the data and an EU cloud we still need chips, operating system, devices. Unless we’re all going to use. Raspberry Pi I’m not sure how this works.
- abdelhousni 8mo agoFirst, Europeans must change their mindset and be really willing to become free.
- Ylpertnodi 8mo agoDone, thanks. Eagerly waiting the next 20 years.
- polski-g 8mo agoYou need a doctor's note to get a gym membership in Italy. In the Netherlands, you need a prescription to get contact lens solution. The rot of regulation is deep within the European psyche.
- aenis 8mo agoI am in the middle of this - my audit committee just told me we need an exit plan "just in case". I don't think this is practically possible. The governments are currently focusing on enabling sovereign clouds - there is real work in France and the Netherlands that I am familiar with. However, almost any company uses a lot of SaaS stuff - also for very core capabilities such as IdP, employee productivity, not to mention the boring stuff - CRMs, ERPs, payment, etc. Some (all, maybe?) have non-US variants, but as anyone who ever worked through an ERP upgrade or a CRM replacement - theoretically trivial exercises - this will be hell on earth. And that does not begin to address the questions such as next gen productivity tools such as frontier models for coding. If Anthropic, Google and OpenAI decided to shut down the Europeans, we'd be screwed for a while. On the positive side, the absolute toxic stuff that tech companies brought to the world - shorts, social media networks - would for a while be inaccessible too, so there is that.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- drivingmenuts 8mo agoWill they also need to separate from the banking systems? As I understand it, almost every banking transaction goes through a US-based network.
- znnajdla 8mo agoThis is not just a sovereignty/security/privacy issue. I genuinely believe that ditching Big Tech will produce genuinely better technology for consumers. Once the monopolists lose their network effect advantage, startups should be forced to adopt more interoperable protocols and foster healthier competition. Big Tech is a cancer, same as any other monopoly.
- AtlasBarfed 8mo agoStates need to sponsor open source to the tune of tens of billions. Ss the reg points out it's now national security in a deglobalization world. I got mocked on this site for suggesting it. But both the EU and the non aligned superpowers need open source hardware and software stacks. It's all there already. The people did 90% of the work. Llms are here to close feature gaps, identify security issues, port code. They are great at cloning and iterative improvement. You don't need some radical new idea. And stand up to American companies And oh jeez, you might get a functioning tech sector of companies. That would be horrible wouldn't it EU. Proprietary software and hardware/firmware is a weapon these days. This is a US issue as well. Open source is the key for the entire economic stack of fabrication of computing devices in a weaponized low trust deglobalized multipolar world. It enabled cooperation, export, multinational companies to make money worldwide
- csantini 8mo agoAws Gcp Azure have overbuilt, you don't need most of those services to build scalable and reliable infra for large institutions
- deadbabe 8mo agoThis is a pipe dream. Also, Europe loves to impose its draconian internet laws on the rest of the world, if mutual respect for sovereignty is what they want, then they can now learn to accept the constraints of another nation’s cloud environment. Sucks doesn’t it?
- siliconc0w 8mo agoAmerican cloud companies will sell you a sovereign cloud solution but these are still pretty much make you a vassal state
- chaostheory 8mo agoGlobalism is dying. Unfortunately, peace goes hand in hand with it.
- fnord77 8mo agoI guess those million dollar bribes to the president's inauguration party were wasted
- DeathArrow 8mo agoWhy now? Why shouldn't have the world reduced its reliance on US tech platforms and services 20 years ago. Or why shouldn't they wait 20 more years. What did happen?
- christkv 8mo agoThere are certain things that would be a pain to do as the platforms we use gives us so much more than just hosting. It means a lot more operational work in our case and loss of certain functionality that has to be reimplemented using some other stack. I don't see it as feasible in the short term, nor cost effective.
- lencastre 8mo agowhat a strange game of chicken, why xan’t amzn, msft, et al just contain their infra within euro borders and call it a day? after all the word multi in multinational does not oblige companies to stop selling in Europe, or?
- kkfx 8mo agoAs an European, I see no point in swapping one dictator for another, or one IT giant for another. What we need is to mandate FLOSS, push for an interconnected Desktop model rather than cloud+mobile, force ISPs to adopt IPv6 with a static global per host, and incentivize domain name purchases while promoting affordable home servers and declarative solutions that are accessible enough to most people so they can deploy their own services independently. It makes no sense whatsoever to switch from Company A to Company B, you're still just a customer at the vendor's mercy.
- stainablesteel 8mo agoincompetent people, making decisions they should have made a decade ago, that will take more than a decade to implement, and will by then probably be just as outdated as this decision is now
- user____name 8mo agoWhen SaaS was emerging I was always advocating for not putting all our eggs into one basket, everyone always suggested was suggesting I was just paranoid. It's just a basic tenet of resilient systems to diversify depenendencies and not outsource all basic knowhow and abilities, even if its more costly. The reason is that institutional knowledge is difficult to build and easy to throw away. Its for the same reason I was hesitant about supporting all those big free trade agreements, for which I was actually called a "national communist" a few times, lol. Funnily enough nowadays I'm the one more open to those free trade blocks in my social circles and everyone has always been against it. I wonder what the consensus will be twenty years from now.
- Gimpei 8mo agoIsn’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.
- heresie-dabord 8mo ago> why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry The EU trusted the US so it made sense to leverage US innovation and leadership. But "Uncle Sam" is no longer an ally. Or a leader. And its recent innovations are toxic to society and democracy.
- christophilus 8mo agoChina has a huge population that mostly speaks Mandarin. The US has a smaller, but relatively wealthy population that mostly speaks English. Europe is a hodgepodge of languages, cultures, and regulatory environments. That’s a beautiful thing, but it’s not an efficient thing from a business perspective.
- Hrun0 8mo ago> China has a huge population that mostly speaks Mandarin. It's about incentives. The Chinese had to come up with their own solutions because of their firewall. Maybe it's time for a European firewall?
- okanat 8mo agoIn China government threatens and stop people selling companies outside. In Europe people who sell out are the members of government. Without a terrible revolution, Europe won't change course.
- amunozo 8mo agoNo need, it was much more comfortable to stay in known sectors such as banking, industry or tourism. Now there is a real need so I'm positive things will change.
- constantcrying 8mo agoMany European companies are already struggling financially, especially the large traditional businesses which form the backbone of the European economy at large. Now you demand that these companies should rip out decades of the IT systems they have built up, which form the backbone of their day to day operations and replace them with third rate alternatives, nowhere near in capability, support and coverage? Yes, I love open source and I wish to see it succeed, but this proposal is suicidal. Even if a superior and less costly alternative did exist (and it does not, just to be clear), just the effort of switching over would ruin these companies.
- dev_l1x_be 8mo agoCan’t wait until any European vendor gets 400 POPs around the globe with tier1 backbone and the same time has an API, can issue top tier certificates and has some of the features that for example Cloudfront has.
- tacker2000 8mo agoWhats the best Euro S3 alternative?
- etyhhgfff 8mo agoHetzner S3 i would say
- cmenge 8mo ago1. Europe doesn't have comparable offerings. The amount of money invested is below what a single hyperscaler spends per quarter. (StackIT might be on track to change that looking at the pure numbers) 2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage; they seem to have little understanding of what "a cloud offering" really is; the EU has less than 5% of GPUs, supposedly 3. For healthcare, they already forced you years ago. This led to hosting on Telekom Cloud which runs on OpenStack by Huawei. (EU commision wants to ban Huawei from 5G but it's ok to use their software? 'Is open source and can be inspected' seems largely theoretical given the reality of cybersecurity) 4. If push comes to shove, the EU is critically dependent on the US in so many aspects (defense, lng to name two very important ones) that eventually, they would falter if the US wants your data in a specific case anyway 5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your data than the other way around That said, would be nice to have healthy competition, but after hearing this for 10++ years, it's getting really old. It might have been a good idea not to sleep on the AI trend, but, well...
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- DarkNova6 8mo agoTrue for the current situation, but something needs to happen before the thinking turns into acting. There's no better time than now, since most cloud services have become commodities. You don't need to be big-tech to have a competitive offering that. Naturally, the tech won't be as efficient and shiny as those of the big ones, but you have none of the corporate bloat and inefficiencies. And don't forget about legislation. If there are new laws that set a limit to egress costs you can say goodbye to the walled garden of cloud empires. After all, how many cloud services does the average company actually need? Most problems have been figured out by now, so such a project would be less like creating thought-leaders and more like a public infrastructure project. With exception of cutting-edge technologies, the cloud has become a commodity.
- hilios 8mo agoWhat incarcerations in Germany are you referring to?
- moltar 8mo agoGood luck rebuilding AWS. It’s a massive undertaking if you want feature parity.
- vga42 8mo agoSure, but how many people/companies are perfectly served by serverless functions + queues + gateway + database + file service? I'd guess >90%. How much of that remaining 10% can be adequately patched by lauching virtual servers? Scaleway and OVHCloud both provide all of that. The problem is more about marketing and a modern variant of the good old "nobody got fired for buying IBM".
- moltar 8mo agoHow about CloudFormation? CloudTrail? IAM? SSO? If you want to make real money, you’ll need an endless amount of EE features, without which no E will commit. You can’t survive on a few consumer features.