8 ms·

For the past days I've been participating(albeit over Teams) in a conference relevant to my industry (intel), basically startups and established companies showc

For the past days I've been participating(albeit over Teams) in a conference relevant to my industry (intel), basically startups and established companies showcasing their products to a closed audience of EU gov. officials. One thing I noticed right away, is that all companies were asked "Can we fully host this from within EU or our country" from the various people in audience. Every single one. Many of the startups had slides prepared for this. Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
unixhero 5mo ago
This is not a change. It has been asked since the advent of GDPR. So nearly 10 years.
- radicalbyte 5mo ago
  In some cases but not enough. Some of us has been doing a lot to help educate companies and business here and with the current administration - and the fact that they are being explicitly backed/funded by the Silicon Valley tech companies long resisted government overreach - have helped to finally open ears in boardrooms to the dangers of the Cloud Act and other leverage.
- sisve 5mo ago
  It started 10 years ago, but have def escalated the last year IMHO. Im sorry to say it, but i feel a lot of Europeans have lost a good deal of trust in the US.
  - rf15 5mo ago
    We have gained a lot of confidence that having control ourselves is actually enormously valuable.
  - PaulKeeble 5mo ago
    The USA is threatening war with the the EU and its allies. A loss of trust doesn't quite convey the seriousness of relationship destruction this causes and the monumental shift that is now happening.
    - kzrdude 5mo ago
      Leaders are not conveying so much about the loss of trust, because they are saving face for the US to try to rescue what little can be rescued of the remaining relationship.
      - j_maffe 5mo ago
        probably also to not make feel Trump too isolated in fears he does something unfixable.
    - sisve 5mo ago
      This is how politicians speak. A loss of trust is actually very serious. The Norwegian foreign minister is saying that the US is no longer sharing our values. That is a _big_ change for us.
  - wolvoleo 5mo ago
    As a European: yes definitely. And that won't be fixed if you choose a sane administration again. There can always be another Trump. It will take significant time to build trust again.
    - drstewart 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      - onemoresoop 5mo ago
        EU wokeup from their sleep with backstabs all around. What a rude awakening indeed. Possibly some were dismissed when they raised this scenario as unlikely.
        drstewart 5mo ago
        There can always be another Orban. Unless Europeans can never trust Hungary again and move away from them at lightspeed, I'm smelling hypocrisy.
        wolvoleo 5mo ago
        I didn't say never. I just said, if America gets a sane administration again, things won't be automatically back to normal. There will be caution for years. Also, any new administration will spend years undoing all the destruction that has been done until things can be considered normal again. And yes I don't trust Hungary.
        onemoresoop 5mo ago
        Trust needs to be earned again, it’s a long process but ultimately it can be gained back
        onemoresoop 5mo ago
        Im sure there are other would be Orbans ready to jump in. In fact the current US admin is stoking the fire openly.
  - pastage 5mo ago
    The complete disinterest in international allies from the American public is troublesome. I recently was in a discussion about what kind of responsibility we can put on the residents of the US for this situation. A US lawyer answered "well the 25th amendment ties our hands, and we do a lot of protesting so no blame on us". The judgement on US citizens was pretty harsh. You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
    - drstewart 5mo ago
      So true. Now, what level of blame can we put on the EU for not supporting Ukraine more over the past few years, with all the vetoes from Hungary?
      - vrganj 5mo ago
        I'm not sure what you're referring to: https://www.kielinstitut.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/ https://www.kielinstitut.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukrai...
        drstewart 5mo ago
        https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq6jrvgqeejo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq6jrvgqeejo Ukraine can never trust the EU again after this. There can always be another Orban. Trust is broken forever.
        vrganj 5mo ago
        Look at the numbers.
        FpUser 5mo ago
        >"Ukraine can never trust the EU again after this. There can always be another Orban." Well, EU and the rest of the world owes nothing to Ukraine, yet they have provided much help. Blind trust is stupid anyways. Especially between countries. >"Trust is broken forever." This sounds like a drama queen. Look at your own politicians first.
  - vrganj 5mo ago
    The fact that you're being downvoted for this shows that Americans are not unaware, but actively in denial instead.
  - chasd00 5mo ago
    trust or not, US vs EU or somewhere else, you should be in charge of your data and your data should be subject to your laws and yours alone. It only makes sense. /lives in the US
    - palata 5mo ago
      Agreed, but that's not how it was because of trust. And now it's changing because of lack of trust. It often feels like US people never trusted the EU and now feel offended when EU people say "we don't trust the US anymore". I find that interesting.
- CalRobert 5mo ago
  GDPR gave us "oh cool AWS has eu-west-1 and pretends to comply so we can also pretend to comply" but I think the tone has shifted to actually caring, at least a little bit. And with the CLOUD act all the US based hyperscalars can't really offer compliant hosting.
- pjc50 5mo ago
  GDPR is a bureaucratic annoyance. Trump is an existential threat.
  - joe_mamba 5mo ago
    Trump is not the core issue since he isn't a hereditary monarchical dictator. It's the US population that's the problem, since they voted to put him into power TWICE, which means that they can also do it again, and again, and again, for other candidates not named Trump and not always Republican, but who could be even more unhinged, so we need to do everything to decouple from them so that their election decisions will impact us less. No offence guys, but you do bare the responsibility of your democratic choices, as do we.
    - pjc50 5mo ago
      Well, neither was Orban, and he caused huge problems. The real enduring toxic legacy is the packing of SCOTUS, sold to voters as a means of overturning Roe V Wade but in fact a massive enabler for corruption and gerrymandering. Those guys are there until they die or Democrats grow a spine, probably the former.
      - joe_mamba 5mo ago
        >Well, neither was Orban, and he caused huge problems. Any democratically elected leader can cause huge problems during their mandate, not just Orban or Trump. You have to wait for elections or their term limit to kick them out peacefully. The difference is whatever the person in the US president seat does, massively affects the whole world, not just the US, which is why we talk a lot more about the huge problems Trump caused rather than what problem the president of Romania, HUngary or Greece cause in their own countries. The issue remains the voting population to not elect people like Orban or Trump at the next elections. The EU can cancel or sway elections in Romania or Hungary to make sure the right candidate wins, but it can't sway US elections in their favor.
        pjc50 5mo ago
jasoneckert 5mo ago
Several organizations in my area of Canada (including ours) have this as a directive right now too, and are actively exploring options for ensuring data is hosted in Canada or Europe (or have already begun or completed their migrations).
- hununu 5mo ago
  Being hosted in Canada is no longer the safety many assumed before. In reality it should not be an American company beholden to the current administration.
  - throwaway2037 5mo ago
    And that has never happened to any European company, right? (I'm looking at you ASML.) By your logic, does that mean that most European nations are "no longer the safety many assumed before"?
    - joe_mamba 5mo ago
      Not just ASML, when I working in EU at another major Dutch semiconductor company, the leadership and decision making was mostly US-based and centered around US policies, even if the HQ was still technically in the NL, but because PE and most other major investors were all US Bay Area. For example my manager had to reject a candidate from Iran, simply due to US policies, even if that wasn't against the EU policies, and would actually have been illegal discrimination in the EU where the position was opened, but this policy came from the US and was applied in an unwritten fashion in the EU. The influence of the US on finance and tech is massively understated. Plenty of international EU tech companies whose business model doesn't revolve around catering to the EU market and sovereignty, will tailor their products and operations to comply with US regulations since that's where a lot of their customer base and money is made. Just read the last post of the CEO of Bird, you can disagree with him that he's a scumbag and he's full of shit, but the truth is if you want your SaaS to make money, you gotta be in the US. That's why Mistral has a large presence in SV and London. Continental EU just sucks for acquiring capital. Even at the no-name Austrian startup I used to work before, the biggest investor was a US PE, since no German or Austrian investor wanted to invest more than 5 figures in the company, which was not enough to cover the payroll of the ML/data scientists. As long as the EU investors refuse to invest in domestic companies and their future, EU companies will forever be tied suckling to the US teat if they wish to grow and survive.
cryo32 5mo ago
Seeing and hearing the same. When our giant private equity owners are even pushing us down the on-prem route. I’m hearing it from “normal” people too which is actually quite weird. To the point of going back to paper for some stuff.
- AllanSavageDev 5mo ago
  I spoke with some high level folks at a very profitable private company recently and inquired as to why they had DBAs on staff for what amounts to a pretty simple OLTP type system. Id naively assumed that someone of that scale would be using a cloud provider (RDS for AWS etc) thus negating the need for someone who really knows DB internals and upgrades and OS level stuff. The answer was that they simply didn't trust GCP or AWS or Azure to see their data and know how much silly money they were making in the niche industry they almost completely monopolize. I recently interviewed with a lower-case-m megacorp in a similar situation and they host on-prem for the same reason, at great expense and hassle in facilities all over the country. Seems like theres room in the market for some kind of an On Prem Private Cloud Stack that emulates GCP/AWS etc but locally maybe? Cloud-In-A-Box anyone?
  - kilburn 5mo ago
    > Seems like theres room in the market for some kind of an On Prem Private Cloud Stack that emulates GCP/AWS etc but locally maybe? It's more like cloud-in-a-rack, but that's what https://oxide.computer/ https://oxide.computer/ is trying to do isn't it?
  - j45 5mo ago
    You are likely describing software like Proxmox which has quietly been able to do so much for a long time. Open source, and works great when small, and at scale. https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environment/overview https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environm... https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=introduction+to+proxmox https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=introduction+to...
  - branko_d 5mo ago
eithed 5mo ago
Loss of trust towards US is one factor; another is enshittification of services; yet another are good enough monopolies that EU don't have capital to disrupt
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  I'm willing to wager a bet the former reason is the bigger reason. Many of the data migrations I've helped with, been to services that owners know are slightly worse or doesn't have one feature they ideally should have had, but because of the first reason, it's more important to move now than to wait for it to be perfect. I don't think many are migrating because of "enshittification of services", I haven't heard that as a reason myself at least.
codethief 5mo ago
Yup, I've been seeing the same development pretty much everywhere. It's become a standard question in procurement processes in all EU-based organizations I've worked for (I'm a consultant).
embedding-shape 5mo ago
> Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago. I work as a consultant and freelancer across a bunch of companies, some American but mostly European ones. Last ~8 months or so, the sentiment about "Hosting our data in EU or even our own country" has drastically changed, I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before. The amount of migrations I've helped moving data from US to EU already is higher this calendar year than all the other years of my career.
- AllanSavageDev 5mo ago
  EU hosting their own ops like they built the Airbus A380: Database runs in France, front end in Belgium, Operations in Spain... EU Fairness dictates they all need to get a slice of the pie so this will be interesting (and by that I mean absurdly hilarious).
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    Yeah, I guess we replaced globalism with Europalism, since some of the other parties who initially pushed for globalism now wants nothing to do with it anymore. Oh well, I'm looking forward to closer connections and relationships to our French and Belgian brothers and sisters :)
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - kergonath 5mo ago
      > Yeah, I guess we replaced globalism with Europalism, since some of the other parties who initially pushed for globalism now wants nothing to do with it anymore. That is a very myopic way of looking at it. Right-wing neoliberal parties were globalists and pro-EU for business reasons. Left-wing social-liberals were pro-EU for social and ideological reasons but were much more ambivalent about globalisation. Hard-right nationalists hate the EU but don’t see much of a problem with globalisation except when people are involved (exploiting them abroad, however, is fine as long as there is a buck to be made). If you’re a bit careful you’ll find opinions all over the place on both globalisation and the EU across the whole spectrum. Globalisation is more something that affect individual member states than a EU issue.
j45 5mo ago
Learning to self-host, or host on different platforms is critical. Designing startups from the beginning to be able to be hosted in different places will become a norm.
MoaMoli 5mo ago
i mean it makes so much sense, cause of the political instability. I recently was at a reception (because of the europe day) and there I talked to some officials that told me that even they don't really know how to to tackle the problems of nowadays. Basically every european state is trying to move its IT infrastructure from the US to Europe and i read somewhere in the news that Aldi is supposed to provide infrastructure to compete with AWS...
- spockz 5mo ago
  It is a subsidiary of Lidl: https://www.techzine.eu/news/infrastructure/140634/dutch-central-bank-chooses-lidl-for-european-cloud/ https://www.techzine.eu/news/infrastructure/140634/dutch-cen...
  - josteinhylin 5mo ago
    [dead]
chasd00 5mo ago
this is good, there's money to be saved in many many cases with self hosting. Cloud was supposed to save money but it's gotten so overdone that now companies have dedicated devops teams just like they use to have dedicated sysadmin teams. I think you can take the opensource paas's out there and selfhost something internal that covers 75-70% of your use case at a fraction of the cost of aws/gcp/azure.
- flumpcakes 5mo ago
  The price of hardware (DELL, HP), and the price of enterprise software (VMWare, Nutanix, etc.) has increased an insane amount in the last 12 months. In our case some of the services it has been as much as 6x. Hardware quotes are rising 10-20% per week. Delivery dates are months out. It has become so bad that we're considering moving to the cloud for our on-premise workloads. Only problem is some of the cloud providers in the areas we operate from have run out of compute.
  - simonjgreen 5mo ago
    What happened with VMWare licensing post acquisition is a travesty and has absolutely ruined what was a great ecosystem of small to medium scale hosting operations (talking in the half a rack to 10 racks territory). There is still no alternative with feature parity.
alibarber 5mo ago
> (albeit over Teams) Would be great if this irony was taken note of at this level.
- aaron695 5mo ago
  [dead]
vanschelven 5mo ago
The fact that these "move off US infra" posts now routinely hit #1 on HN is itself pretty telling. Another example is the public outcry here in the Netherlands over selling off the company doing the infra for an important citizen-facing piece of government software (DigiD)...
leokennis 5mo ago
It's interesting the economic damage a few disgruntled WASP's in US swing states can do to the US economy by electing an orange toddler.
ffritz 5mo ago
I feel this and as a German company, we have our stuff hosted in the EU. But where it becomes pointless to have the host in the EU, is when Cloudflare is a requirement. Since we expose ourselfs through their certificate, we might as well host with a US company. And I’m not aware of a EU Cloudflare competitor with similar WAF offering.
- happyspacebear 5mo ago
  Can you explain that a bit more?
  - ffritz 5mo ago
    A full integration with Cloudflare means it is their SSL certificate that’s presented to the visitor of your website, and all traffic is passed through them. They do read everything. Thus it’s pointless to host in the EU if everything first has to go through a US company.
- mboehm 5mo ago
  I would try Myra. They are based in Munich.
  - ffritz 5mo ago
    Their pricing shows me “starts at 399€/month”, that’s insane. CF Pro is 25$/month.
- geri4 5mo ago
  try Gcore as an EU alternative for Cloudflare
clickety_clack 5mo ago
We were doing this in Canada at least 6 years ago, maybe even longer. If the servers are in a different country, your data is sitting on a machine that is subject to a foreign country’s laws and is accessible to their law enforcement.
Macha 5mo ago
I’ve been working in a European SaaS for a few years and I’ve even noticed we get more queries about using specially EU providers. In the past AWS eu-west was sufficiently “In Europe” for clients that cared about that but there’s a growing minority that would like us not to use AWS at all. Not in large enough numbers that our company is planning a migration but it’s being discussed in a way it wasn’t in 2024.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

unixhero 5mo ago

This is not a change. It has been asked since the advent of GDPR. So nearly 10 years.

radicalbyte 5mo ago
In some cases but not enough. Some of us has been doing a lot to help educate companies and business here and with the current administration - and the fact that they are being explicitly backed/funded by the Silicon Valley tech companies long resisted government overreach - have helped to finally open ears in boardrooms to the dangers of the Cloud Act and other leverage.
sisve 5mo ago
It started 10 years ago, but have def escalated the last year IMHO. Im sorry to say it, but i feel a lot of Europeans have lost a good deal of trust in the US.
- rf15 5mo ago
  We have gained a lot of confidence that having control ourselves is actually enormously valuable.
- PaulKeeble 5mo ago
  The USA is threatening war with the the EU and its allies. A loss of trust doesn't quite convey the seriousness of relationship destruction this causes and the monumental shift that is now happening.
  - kzrdude 5mo ago
    Leaders are not conveying so much about the loss of trust, because they are saving face for the US to try to rescue what little can be rescued of the remaining relationship.
    - j_maffe 5mo ago
      probably also to not make feel Trump too isolated in fears he does something unfixable.
  - sisve 5mo ago
    This is how politicians speak. A loss of trust is actually very serious. The Norwegian foreign minister is saying that the US is no longer sharing our values. That is a _big_ change for us.
- wolvoleo 5mo ago
  As a European: yes definitely. And that won't be fixed if you choose a sane administration again. There can always be another Trump. It will take significant time to build trust again.
  - drstewart 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - onemoresoop 5mo ago
      EU wokeup from their sleep with backstabs all around. What a rude awakening indeed. Possibly some were dismissed when they raised this scenario as unlikely.
      - drstewart 5mo ago
        There can always be another Orban. Unless Europeans can never trust Hungary again and move away from them at lightspeed, I'm smelling hypocrisy.
        wolvoleo 5mo ago
        I didn't say never. I just said, if America gets a sane administration again, things won't be automatically back to normal. There will be caution for years. Also, any new administration will spend years undoing all the destruction that has been done until things can be considered normal again. And yes I don't trust Hungary.
        onemoresoop 5mo ago
        Trust needs to be earned again, it’s a long process but ultimately it can be gained back
        onemoresoop 5mo ago
        Im sure there are other would be Orbans ready to jump in. In fact the current US admin is stoking the fire openly.
- pastage 5mo ago
  The complete disinterest in international allies from the American public is troublesome. I recently was in a discussion about what kind of responsibility we can put on the residents of the US for this situation. A US lawyer answered "well the 25th amendment ties our hands, and we do a lot of protesting so no blame on us". The judgement on US citizens was pretty harsh. You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
  - drstewart 5mo ago
    So true. Now, what level of blame can we put on the EU for not supporting Ukraine more over the past few years, with all the vetoes from Hungary?
    - vrganj 5mo ago
      I'm not sure what you're referring to: https://www.kielinstitut.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/ https://www.kielinstitut.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukrai...
      - drstewart 5mo ago
        https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq6jrvgqeejo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq6jrvgqeejo Ukraine can never trust the EU again after this. There can always be another Orban. Trust is broken forever.
        vrganj 5mo ago
        Look at the numbers.
        FpUser 5mo ago
        >"Ukraine can never trust the EU again after this. There can always be another Orban." Well, EU and the rest of the world owes nothing to Ukraine, yet they have provided much help. Blind trust is stupid anyways. Especially between countries. >"Trust is broken forever." This sounds like a drama queen. Look at your own politicians first.
- vrganj 5mo ago
  The fact that you're being downvoted for this shows that Americans are not unaware, but actively in denial instead.
- chasd00 5mo ago
  trust or not, US vs EU or somewhere else, you should be in charge of your data and your data should be subject to your laws and yours alone. It only makes sense. /lives in the US
  - palata 5mo ago
    Agreed, but that's not how it was because of trust. And now it's changing because of lack of trust. It often feels like US people never trusted the EU and now feel offended when EU people say "we don't trust the US anymore". I find that interesting.
CalRobert 5mo ago
GDPR gave us "oh cool AWS has eu-west-1 and pretends to comply so we can also pretend to comply" but I think the tone has shifted to actually caring, at least a little bit. And with the CLOUD act all the US based hyperscalars can't really offer compliant hosting.
pjc50 5mo ago
GDPR is a bureaucratic annoyance. Trump is an existential threat.
- joe_mamba 5mo ago
  Trump is not the core issue since he isn't a hereditary monarchical dictator. It's the US population that's the problem, since they voted to put him into power TWICE, which means that they can also do it again, and again, and again, for other candidates not named Trump and not always Republican, but who could be even more unhinged, so we need to do everything to decouple from them so that their election decisions will impact us less. No offence guys, but you do bare the responsibility of your democratic choices, as do we.
  - pjc50 5mo ago
    Well, neither was Orban, and he caused huge problems. The real enduring toxic legacy is the packing of SCOTUS, sold to voters as a means of overturning Roe V Wade but in fact a massive enabler for corruption and gerrymandering. Those guys are there until they die or Democrats grow a spine, probably the former.
    - joe_mamba 5mo ago
      >Well, neither was Orban, and he caused huge problems. Any democratically elected leader can cause huge problems during their mandate, not just Orban or Trump. You have to wait for elections or their term limit to kick them out peacefully. The difference is whatever the person in the US president seat does, massively affects the whole world, not just the US, which is why we talk a lot more about the huge problems Trump caused rather than what problem the president of Romania, HUngary or Greece cause in their own countries. The issue remains the voting population to not elect people like Orban or Trump at the next elections. The EU can cancel or sway elections in Romania or Hungary to make sure the right candidate wins, but it can't sway US elections in their favor.
      - pjc50 5mo ago

jasoneckert 5mo ago

Several organizations in my area of Canada (including ours) have this as a directive right now too, and are actively exploring options for ensuring data is hosted in Canada or Europe (or have already begun or completed their migrations).

hununu 5mo ago
Being hosted in Canada is no longer the safety many assumed before. In reality it should not be an American company beholden to the current administration.
- throwaway2037 5mo ago
  And that has never happened to any European company, right? (I'm looking at you ASML.) By your logic, does that mean that most European nations are "no longer the safety many assumed before"?
  - joe_mamba 5mo ago
    Not just ASML, when I working in EU at another major Dutch semiconductor company, the leadership and decision making was mostly US-based and centered around US policies, even if the HQ was still technically in the NL, but because PE and most other major investors were all US Bay Area. For example my manager had to reject a candidate from Iran, simply due to US policies, even if that wasn't against the EU policies, and would actually have been illegal discrimination in the EU where the position was opened, but this policy came from the US and was applied in an unwritten fashion in the EU. The influence of the US on finance and tech is massively understated. Plenty of international EU tech companies whose business model doesn't revolve around catering to the EU market and sovereignty, will tailor their products and operations to comply with US regulations since that's where a lot of their customer base and money is made. Just read the last post of the CEO of Bird, you can disagree with him that he's a scumbag and he's full of shit, but the truth is if you want your SaaS to make money, you gotta be in the US. That's why Mistral has a large presence in SV and London. Continental EU just sucks for acquiring capital. Even at the no-name Austrian startup I used to work before, the biggest investor was a US PE, since no German or Austrian investor wanted to invest more than 5 figures in the company, which was not enough to cover the payroll of the ML/data scientists. As long as the EU investors refuse to invest in domestic companies and their future, EU companies will forever be tied suckling to the US teat if they wish to grow and survive.

cryo32 5mo ago

Seeing and hearing the same. When our giant private equity owners are even pushing us down the on-prem route. I’m hearing it from “normal” people too which is actually quite weird. To the point of going back to paper for some stuff.

AllanSavageDev 5mo ago
I spoke with some high level folks at a very profitable private company recently and inquired as to why they had DBAs on staff for what amounts to a pretty simple OLTP type system. Id naively assumed that someone of that scale would be using a cloud provider (RDS for AWS etc) thus negating the need for someone who really knows DB internals and upgrades and OS level stuff. The answer was that they simply didn't trust GCP or AWS or Azure to see their data and know how much silly money they were making in the niche industry they almost completely monopolize. I recently interviewed with a lower-case-m megacorp in a similar situation and they host on-prem for the same reason, at great expense and hassle in facilities all over the country. Seems like theres room in the market for some kind of an On Prem Private Cloud Stack that emulates GCP/AWS etc but locally maybe? Cloud-In-A-Box anyone?
- kilburn 5mo ago
  > Seems like theres room in the market for some kind of an On Prem Private Cloud Stack that emulates GCP/AWS etc but locally maybe? It's more like cloud-in-a-rack, but that's what https://oxide.computer/ https://oxide.computer/ is trying to do isn't it?
- j45 5mo ago
  You are likely describing software like Proxmox which has quietly been able to do so much for a long time. Open source, and works great when small, and at scale. https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environment/overview https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environm... https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=introduction+to+proxmox https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=introduction+to...
- branko_d 5mo ago

eithed 5mo ago

Loss of trust towards US is one factor; another is enshittification of services; yet another are good enough monopolies that EU don't have capital to disrupt

embedding-shape 5mo ago
I'm willing to wager a bet the former reason is the bigger reason. Many of the data migrations I've helped with, been to services that owners know are slightly worse or doesn't have one feature they ideally should have had, but because of the first reason, it's more important to move now than to wait for it to be perfect. I don't think many are migrating because of "enshittification of services", I haven't heard that as a reason myself at least.

codethief 5mo ago

Yup, I've been seeing the same development pretty much everywhere. It's become a standard question in procurement processes in all EU-based organizations I've worked for (I'm a consultant).

embedding-shape 5mo ago

> Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago. I work as a consultant and freelancer across a bunch of companies, some American but mostly European ones. Last ~8 months or so, the sentiment about "Hosting our data in EU or even our own country" has drastically changed, I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before. The amount of migrations I've helped moving data from US to EU already is higher this calendar year than all the other years of my career.

AllanSavageDev 5mo ago
EU hosting their own ops like they built the Airbus A380: Database runs in France, front end in Belgium, Operations in Spain... EU Fairness dictates they all need to get a slice of the pie so this will be interesting (and by that I mean absurdly hilarious).
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  Yeah, I guess we replaced globalism with Europalism, since some of the other parties who initially pushed for globalism now wants nothing to do with it anymore. Oh well, I'm looking forward to closer connections and relationships to our French and Belgian brothers and sisters :)
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - kergonath 5mo ago
    > Yeah, I guess we replaced globalism with Europalism, since some of the other parties who initially pushed for globalism now wants nothing to do with it anymore. That is a very myopic way of looking at it. Right-wing neoliberal parties were globalists and pro-EU for business reasons. Left-wing social-liberals were pro-EU for social and ideological reasons but were much more ambivalent about globalisation. Hard-right nationalists hate the EU but don’t see much of a problem with globalisation except when people are involved (exploiting them abroad, however, is fine as long as there is a buck to be made). If you’re a bit careful you’ll find opinions all over the place on both globalisation and the EU across the whole spectrum. Globalisation is more something that affect individual member states than a EU issue.

j45 5mo ago

Learning to self-host, or host on different platforms is critical. Designing startups from the beginning to be able to be hosted in different places will become a norm.

MoaMoli 5mo ago

i mean it makes so much sense, cause of the political instability. I recently was at a reception (because of the europe day) and there I talked to some officials that told me that even they don't really know how to to tackle the problems of nowadays. Basically every european state is trying to move its IT infrastructure from the US to Europe and i read somewhere in the news that Aldi is supposed to provide infrastructure to compete with AWS...

spockz 5mo ago
It is a subsidiary of Lidl: https://www.techzine.eu/news/infrastructure/140634/dutch-central-bank-chooses-lidl-for-european-cloud/ https://www.techzine.eu/news/infrastructure/140634/dutch-cen...
- josteinhylin 5mo ago
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chasd00 5mo ago

this is good, there's money to be saved in many many cases with self hosting. Cloud was supposed to save money but it's gotten so overdone that now companies have dedicated devops teams just like they use to have dedicated sysadmin teams. I think you can take the opensource paas's out there and selfhost something internal that covers 75-70% of your use case at a fraction of the cost of aws/gcp/azure.

flumpcakes 5mo ago
The price of hardware (DELL, HP), and the price of enterprise software (VMWare, Nutanix, etc.) has increased an insane amount in the last 12 months. In our case some of the services it has been as much as 6x. Hardware quotes are rising 10-20% per week. Delivery dates are months out. It has become so bad that we're considering moving to the cloud for our on-premise workloads. Only problem is some of the cloud providers in the areas we operate from have run out of compute.
- simonjgreen 5mo ago
  What happened with VMWare licensing post acquisition is a travesty and has absolutely ruined what was a great ecosystem of small to medium scale hosting operations (talking in the half a rack to 10 racks territory). There is still no alternative with feature parity.

alibarber 5mo ago

> (albeit over Teams) Would be great if this irony was taken note of at this level.

aaron695 5mo ago
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vanschelven 5mo ago

The fact that these "move off US infra" posts now routinely hit #1 on HN is itself pretty telling. Another example is the public outcry here in the Netherlands over selling off the company doing the infra for an important citizen-facing piece of government software (DigiD)...

leokennis 5mo ago

It's interesting the economic damage a few disgruntled WASP's in US swing states can do to the US economy by electing an orange toddler.

ffritz 5mo ago

I feel this and as a German company, we have our stuff hosted in the EU. But where it becomes pointless to have the host in the EU, is when Cloudflare is a requirement. Since we expose ourselfs through their certificate, we might as well host with a US company. And I’m not aware of a EU Cloudflare competitor with similar WAF offering.

happyspacebear 5mo ago
Can you explain that a bit more?
- ffritz 5mo ago
  A full integration with Cloudflare means it is their SSL certificate that’s presented to the visitor of your website, and all traffic is passed through them. They do read everything. Thus it’s pointless to host in the EU if everything first has to go through a US company.
mboehm 5mo ago
I would try Myra. They are based in Munich.
- ffritz 5mo ago
  Their pricing shows me “starts at 399€/month”, that’s insane. CF Pro is 25$/month.
geri4 5mo ago
try Gcore as an EU alternative for Cloudflare

clickety_clack 5mo ago

We were doing this in Canada at least 6 years ago, maybe even longer. If the servers are in a different country, your data is sitting on a machine that is subject to a foreign country’s laws and is accessible to their law enforcement.

Macha 5mo ago

I’ve been working in a European SaaS for a few years and I’ve even noticed we get more queries about using specially EU providers. In the past AWS eu-west was sufficiently “In Europe” for clients that cared about that but there’s a growing minority that would like us not to use AWS at all. Not in large enough numbers that our company is planning a migration but it’s being discussed in a way it wasn’t in 2024.