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.
I don't know, maybe because your president is a dangerous lunatic? I really enjoy these "are we the baddies?" moments.
Because your CEOs have become power players in your politics and that’s generally a Russian/Oligarch thing.
Like Apple trying to wiggle their way out of the DMA and when their bs arguments fail in court they send peach daddy with tariffs and what not.
There's lots of interesting stuff to watch out for.
I don't know what you mean by China "getting rid of Microsoft" in the context of cloud providers. I mean, Azure is already present in China's internet, and just like any cloud provider present in China it's presence is a partnership with local cloud providers.
Russia is getting rid of Microsoft not because it has a choice. They are subjected to sanctions due to their invasion of Ukraine, and that essentially cut their access to all tech services. By that measuring stick, Russia is also getting rid of Boeing and Airbus.
So now what? How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy. How can multiple nations create policy which drives business on partially compatible protocols?
If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements. Protectionism is natural, but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence.
The clearest example is a dependency on a single wealthy nation for military and world policing. It's a good thing for individual countries to be able to project their own foreign policy goals like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics. Even here in Canada we should be able to defend their own arctic border reliably and be able to project power to China/India beyond strongly worded letters.
> I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.
Ignoring the US's recent moves there does seem to be more trade deals than ever between 'middle powers'.
> isolationism is a death sentence
The best way to maintain global relationships is to offer tons of value. Similar to how China can get good trade deals and influence simply because they have so much to offer economically. This isn't just issues of diplomacy.
One of the USA's greatest exports is intelligence and higher education, and what has been happening with that and the general anti-intellectual atmosphere is to me the most concerning as an american. Ironically, public education in america has been pretty bad for a while. But I'm going to start rambling here... way too many problems, and no damn leadership.
If I may humbly submit, this is not without justification, considering the unadulterated excrement that has been coming out of our institutions of higher learning. There are a lot of people at universities receiving comfortable taxpayer-funded salaries who spend an awful lot of time disparaging the American spirit.
> public education in america has been pretty bad for a while
Large parts of public education in America is currently a loop of tax dollars that cycle between politicians who shovel an ever-increasing amount of money in and teachers' union leaders that get paid very well and return some money in the form of far-left political activism and donations to those same politicians. Actually teaching kids is at best a fourth or fifth priority.
Nearly every Republican who was in Congress in 2014 would have described at least 3/4 of what Trump has done this term as illegal and totally unacceptable, and would have described at least half of the rest as incompetent.
Unless you can make a case that since 2014 the country has moved so far to the right that even 2014 Republicans are now "far left", about the only thing you can infer from someone bitching about Trump is that they are probably not far right. (Even that one is pretty iffy because he's pissed off a lot of the far right now too).
I think at the moment Canada faces way bigger problems from the south.
Exactly. Not only there's the absurd campaign from the Trump administration on how Canada should be a state but there are also the recent treasonous talks between representatives from the Trump administration and the Alberta separatists.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/eby-alberta-separatism-9.70...
Putin's regime might be a cancer of humanity, but Canadians have far more reasons to feel threatened by the Trump admin than from Putin, even if Trump is a proxy for Putin.
That's true, but at the same time it was probably already the case before invasion of Ukraine, and it is definitely the case now.
The main issue is political fragmentation: would Paris and Berlin risk lives of French and German people (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to save Vilnius?
But if the answer is true (as obligated by the Treaty of Maastricht, independently of NATO) then Russia stands no chance with conventional weapons against the whole Western Europe, the balance of military, demographic and industrial power is ridiculously lopsided (involving nuclear weapons would also raise the same political question about the French willingness to nuke Russia in retaliation to Russia nuking Poland but if the answer is yes, Russia cannot win a nuclear war either (which everyone would lose)).
Yes very much.
This is a wrong question. If one day Russia feels brave enough to attack any NATO country, the right question to ask is, "Do we want to fight this war on someone else's soil or on ours?". This is the reason why Europe is so focused on helping Ukraine BTW.
If anything, I'd say for other countries it's more urgent.
If China embargoes deliveries of light bulbs to Europe, all the light bulbs already in place keep working. The pain would grow over time - giving a grace period, to ramp up local production.
If America embargoes AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft? The pain would be instant and severe.
The immediate and obvious response would be for the foreign branches of those companies to be declared "of national interest", nationalized and forced to keep operating.
Assuming there is no some kill switch which would render a whole infra including hardware inoperable.
The world would break pretty quickly if we all just stopped trading with each other.
If you can't get natural gas from Russia you can get it shipped from America or Australia or Qatar - it's expensive as hell, and you might need to quickly build new regasification plants, but your economy keeps running. And there's no remote kill switch that disables the gas you already have in-country.
That's not the case for the services provided by AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft though - the 'competition' is one US provider vs another.
This is an aspect the west seems to have missed entirely as there are no attempts to learn from it or emulate it.
Everyone knows about Shenzhen. Not everyone knows that this is how every major manufacturing industry is clustered in China in various cities and regions.
The downside is that it decimates entire regions if/when the demand for what they produce drops.
My point about maintaining higher economic efficiency is actually the same point you're making. How can the globe (not just the west vs the east) learn from the past and build for the future. We live in a magical world with translation services available to billions of people, how can we empower them to organize around the right ideas. How can we preserve culture and art while flooding ourselves with technologies developed globally? Who pays for security and research? Intellectual property law in general?
So many big issues and questions still need a lot of work.
Take for instance the space sector. It is fragmented by design. By Congress. Not only is it spread all over the country, making collaboration expensive, time-consuming and clumsy: there are essentially six different federal space agencies of which NASA is just one. This is terribly inefficient.
I remember when reading about the Apollo missions it was astonishing just how much time they lost by different parts being built all over the US and then shipped across the country to be integrated. Utter engineering madness that was only made to work because one could pour immense amount of cash on it.
This is why companies like SpaceX was able to run more efficiently: they do a lot more in vastly fewer locations. Ditto for Lockheed during their golden years: Skunk Works was famous for having "everyone under one roof and within walking distance of each other". (That Skunk Works neither exists anymore, nor can it exist, but that's a longer story which is also about extreme inefficiency).
It is reasonable to assume that Europe wouldn't do any better. Or any setup where politicians are inclined to optimize for regional gain. You'd probably end up with the same political fights over who gets what if the EU were to push towards more of the kinds of manufacturing that you find in China.
We know we're inefficient and we have some idea of why. We like to blame factors that are easy to politicise or evoke emotion (environment, exploitation of the poor etc), but I don't think they are as important as people tend to think.
We just don't want to change. And there are legitimate reasons for that. Chief among them that we're uncomfortable with strong central control. (Well, we used to be. It only took a majority of republicans about a decade to turn 180 degrees on that question and prefer an all-controlling federal government dominated by the executive branch)
I find this sort of compartmentalization offensive to the common good.
Open source with clear international governance and maintainer/contributor base, in such a way that a geopolitical rift leaves both sides with working software.
That works for tech and the infrastructure, of course, but not for the corporations built upon them.
> more international lawyers
I don't see that as a significant source of safety in our current world.
> isolationism is a death sentence.
The current US admin isn't isolationist, it's merely reverting back to 19th century imperialism.
One of the issues with the current system is that the WTO appellate body, which is effectively the court of world trade, requires USA approval for any appointments, which both Trump and Biden have refused to give. This effectively makes the WTO completely impotent.
I would argue that few large countries have everything to be self sufficient. For the rest - they would have to band together to avoid being at the mercy of their bigger overlords.
As for efficiencies of the past: I think they lead to a complete monopoly / near monopoly in few critical areas. The result - the monopoly power becoming a political weapon and or critical vulnerability.
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.
If I may ask, why didn't you choose the cheaper option before? What do you think you're trading off, if anything?
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.
Worse, closing an OVH account is very hard. Every domain you host there they sign you up to several services, and you need to manually disable each one before they let you close the account. This then often gets stuck, because of the broken UI, and you end up needing to badger support over and over until they'll fix it
Never again
But their web UI looks and feels like it was pieced together by hamsters. It doesn't leave me feeling confident in their technical abilities in any way.
But maybe I should be the change I wanna see!
The one under US jurisdiction operated by Hetzner US LLC must comply, while the German ones are operating under the GDPR, which has extraterritorial clauses can can deny or challenge the request.
The reality is that if you have any interest, company or employees in the US you can be coerced to do anything the US government wants.
Either legally through courts, or through business influence, or through harassment (e.g. hardcore checks from the IRS).
Sorry, Stripe rejects you now because you are high-risk (you have to explain why you refuse to help in criminal cases, though there is a court requesting you).
You don't like to comply to US requests and protect terrorists ?
https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-to-resolve-blocks-o...
Still don't comply ?
You are added to sanctions list, end of the game.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0185
Even Microsoft acknowledges that these cross-border requests cannot be avoided.
https://www.convotis.com/es/en/news/microsoft-access-eu-data
The same way that EU can force fetching data from the US entity.
Now on the EU side:
GDPR fine of 4% of your worldwide income. Well, too bad, your US entity refused, we will have to punish your EU entity very strongly.
If small provider, oh right you refuse ? Well, we will notify your bank that you do not respect the court orders, etc.
The law is one of the way of enforcement, but there are multiple stages of pressure.
Still refuse ? Well, let's come to you at 6am then.
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2020/07/10/57...
"Storm" -> "the European end to end encrypted privacy-conscious messenger app"
He refuses, his company refuses, everybody refuses.
Do you think he can evade US justice even if the company is incorporated in the EU ?
Collaborating is the path of least resistance, and as long as you can claim somewhat "we didn't have any choice, we were coerced" then you are fine. This is also why Apple, Google, Meta, NordVPN, etc, are all collaborating with the infamous FBI DITU group.
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.
Also: there may be _a_ chance that the situation will improve, but as the Dutch say "Trust Arrives on Foot, but Leaves on Horseback" and your even given your "even if" the trust thrown away in the past year will take literal decades to repair.
Companies have this risk adversity when it comes to trusting all their infrastructure to a person that knows it all and can do it on three physical servers.
I am old enough to have set up services on bare metal servers with what was virtualization or containerization back then (vserver), but today no one wants to know how to tweak Postfix because some emails are not coming through or whatnot.
A person that knows it all and can do it all on AWS, on the other hand...
We (10 people) run this + CI on just a VM + storage provider, mostly VSphere from our sister team of 6 (and yes it hurts, and we have no time to move it), Hetzner and some legacy things on AWS.
Though that's currently the problem -- there is a somewhat steep minimal invest of time into this. But that's good, because this means there could be value for European cloud providers to build up this narrow stack managed and get paid for it. We will see.
But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be directly responsible for them. That's where the problem lies, as I see it.
I don't know what managers have been reading/hearing, but for the last decade or so as a developer what I've mostly been hearing is that the only people who actually benefit from Big Data architectures are FAANG, that it's much cheaper to run on a single small self-hosted system that's done right, that the complexity of managing the cloud is even higher than a local solution.
This matches my own experience of what people needed to serve millions of users 20 years ago. If you can't handle a chat system or a simple sales system with 100k-1M customers on a server made out of one single modern mobile phone, you're either just not trying hard enough or have too many layers of abstraction between business logic and bare metal. Even for something a bit more challenging than that, you should still be thinking thousands of users on a phone and 10k-100k on a single device that's actually meant to work as a server.
This is more than a theory, it's a trend that is already underway. The cloud remains supremely capital efficient for startups, but pricing has crept up and some customers are falling off the other side of the table.
Why won't they be able to buy them from EU providers?
That's true right now, yes. But things are changing rapidly, e.g. there is evroc [1], Mimer [2] and others are popping up too.
it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering
I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark, things in principle can be done much faster if you are smaller, nimbler and more focused. The solution to EUs problems is less paperwork and meetings, and more smaller bespoke companies that are laser focused on solving a specific sub-problem. Can they do it? Probably not if they try to create their Google or Microsoft.
Now that AWS has two serious competitors (and some non serious ones), privately funding another one just seems impossible to me. Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?
I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of:
1. EU intervention (nasty regulations and expensive subsidies).
2. People using non-equivalent products (Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house). This part would have its upsides anyway TBH.
Just mandate EU countries' public administration to rely exclusively on EU cloud solutions. That doesn't need to be done at once.
This would create enough of a captive market to start the homegrown industry.
> Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house
To be honest, every large enough company would benefit from doing a little bit of that.
This happens already in some areas and it is not cheaper or better. The EU funds national clouds where public institutions use them. What does it mean? VMware with Tanzu or OpenStack. And then some services thrown in to offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to be built by the beneficiaries. Servers? Brand names like Lenovo/HP/Dell. Storage? Brand names like NetApp, HP, Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on. Networking? Cisco (mostly), HP/Juniper. Firewalls? Cisco/Fortinet/PaloAlto/CheckPoint/etc.
Basically an enterprise setup masquerading as a cloud offering.
And even if there would be EU wide offerings for such cloud, there's too much money at stake to let institutions from one country buy services from another.
My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years. And if you extrapolate that to any other technology, you will find out very fast that it is very expensive to come up with a replacement solution that will actually be embraced by potential customers.
I don't think the right explanation of MS monopoly is technical superiority, but rather the natural forces of monopoly. They are extremely hard to break with free market competition, but can definitely be broken with legislation.
I am convinced that 99% of office use can be replaced with competitors if needed, and it would work out OK.
The counterpoint is that they don't need to be on par :-/ The problem is that individual procurement decision-makers are incentivised to go with the Microsoft suite, not that the alternatives aren't a good enough replacement.
If that were true, they'd have ditched Microsoft already. Since they didn't, I'm skeptical that that is their incentive.
There is almost no chance for that, as lost trust does not return instantly.
I kinda do want it to have passed that point, but not as much as I'm glad he TACOed.
* There's other metaphorical Rubicons available, this is just the one most in my mind given I live in the EU
People don't quite realize how big a deal "invading" Greenland would have been. That's literally an act of war! What's next, occupying France? Saying that it's at all a possibility is far beyond any red line that the EU thought it would have to deal with.
Not only would the rest of the world ditch the USA, but the Democrats themselves would take the opportunity to publically announce that they do not recognize Donald Trump's government.
Yes, absolutely, I agree.
Thing is, in the end he backed off, so the result was all talk. He TACOed.
For everyone's sake (including Americans'), I absolutely 100% want the EU to disentangle as much as possible and as fast as possible from the US so that we don't even feel the need to be polite to Trump in the future: he obviously sees the world as only predators to be scared of and prey to consume, so it's better for us (everyone, not just the EU) to become big and scary really fast so he doesn't even try anything.
If he were to invade (anywhere, not just Greenland), that place and their allies basically have two options: fight or die.
> Not only would the rest of the world ditch the USA, but the Democrats themselves would take the opportunity to publically announce that they do not recognize Donald Trump's government.
I wish, but humans aren't like that.
The Democrat leadership keep pulling defeat from the jaws of victory, and people are the same everywhere so an external threat is more likely to pull everyone together than to split them apart (same for everyone else is why the EU and Canada are warming, or at least thawing, their relationships with the rest of the world).
What might have happened before an invasion was enough Republicans finally kicking him out (with Democrat support), or a US military coup (I'd say 50% if it got that far, but with high uncertainty).
A military coup would also be a crossed Rubicon.
But the military don't like traitors, and betraying an ally by invading it is an act of treachery.
But for a few days (and probably still now), many people considered it was a real possibility.
I don't think it matters whether the US meant it or not. What matters is whether the Europeans believed it or not. Trust is about belief.
I think I'm being misunderstood here.
All the stuff you said, that's why I want to make sure we (Europeans) *don't* go "phew!"
I think some of us might be doing that, which I think is bad for us.
Nothing would have come of it. Ehe EU would have been upset for 3-6 months, then it would have got onboard with the idea that Greenland is now a US territory and that's that.
France has a too good of a cuisine to be invaded. I think Germany would be next, they are running their mouth more than they should and they suck at food.
Unless the mid-terms change the political majority in the US, the Democrats can wine all they want and recognize or not recognize whoever they want as president. It will not change the actual situation.
One of the criticisms I hear of Merz is that he's not tough enough on Trump; therefore the choice to target Germany at this time, matches a pattern of the target being painted on whoever wants to play nice.
We (both of my "we"s given I'm a British citizen but live in the EU) sent in tripwire forces to defend Greenland. Their purpose is that getting shot is a casus belli for us to go to war with the USA.
Also remember: NATO has two other nuclear powers besides the USA, and the biggest flaw with one of those nuclear arsenals is how when the UK test-fired the missiles it bought from the USA, they went the wrong way or didn't launch properly at all.
I don't know what the order of events would have been given how heavily tied together EU and US (and UK) economies are, but essentially the EU banning the purchase of new US treasuries by itself would cause something in the order of US inflation going to 10% for several years; this, plus any economic departure (I'm thinking emigration more than internment camps like Japanese-Americans in WW2, much worse if that) from all the European migrants on visas (and some or all of the naturalised ones, but that number will be less… unless Trump also strips that like he's been suggesting), the US could loose 2-5 million people's worth of useful economic labour from the workforce. (Even if they're put in work camps, they're not getting good work out of them).
In the other direction, if the US cuts off cloud computing today, the EU is almost immediately screwed. Hence article.
But if the EU's screwed, then we don't have the money to buy the US treasuries, so screwing us also screws the US. That 10% inflation I mentioned, that's just from not buying T-bills; screwing the EU like this would also mean no more trade with the EU, which basically doubles the US unemployment rate on top of that, budget deficit goes to $3T/year, and costs the US 5% GDP relative to the baseline (i.e. what it would have been without invading) forever. Without a shot fired. But France has enough nukes that even if the USA's anti-missile defences can stop 80% of them, it could by itself destroy every US state capital and still have several left over.
And if you're worried about Russia taking over Greenland, oh boy you should worry about what they do to a catastrophically weakened Europe that isn't just a hard-to-mine sheet of ice supporting a population that wouldn't even half-fill these seats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Narendra_Modi_Stadium_vie...
There's already been articles in Politico where USA lawmakers admit that there would have been a War Measures Act passed if Trump invaded Greenland. Unlike Venezuela.
It would definitely change the political situation if the state governments of California, New York et al stopped recognizing the federal government.
No matter how reasonable the next few administrations are it is hard to see anyone else trusting the US nearly as much as they did before 2024.
That's mostly how it was during the last US presidential term. The president even said that "America is back" (1)
The fact is, it didn't last. America going away was not a one-off. It happened a second time, worse. The lesson that the USA just is a country that does this from time to time. People in the rest of the world who learn that lesson will prepare for the next time.
As another US president accurately said: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice ... you can't get fooled again."
1) https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/250909...
I worked for/with several European startups. They really didn't need nor aim for planet scale operations.
There are also quite a lot of articles about how startups (in any country) focus needlesly on large scalability when they only really have a few customers. It's exactly the same false issue here.
It depends on the market they're operating in. Planet scale operations can mean have the site load as fast as possible in every country on the planet, because this is how we make money.
Working within a smaller geography I guess you can "host" your services anywhere in Europe and be pretty snappy.
I could mention the fact that EU based startups don't dream big and this is costing them a lot of revenue from markets they don't wish to operate in because they think Europe is big enough. But we're gonna start a discussion not meant for this thread.
Large companies do that as well
You don't need all of that. You can go a long way with the basics, and those are well covered.
Those should most of what startups need for deployment; at least what I've seen working with many over the last few years.
For those with pragmatic Linux Ops experience on the team, nothing will beat self-hosted on Hetzner dedicated servers, at a great price.
P.S. can't vouch for all Scaleway services, used it for a couple of VMs and hosted LLMs only. Happy to hear the experience of other users, no matter how few of those are here.
Free credits for startups are a different aspect of incentive, which is not negligible.
RDS backups and retrivals from cold storage[2] are both a lot slower than AWS. The "high-availablity" instances for RDS are in the same DC, so the feature is cosmetic. Ignoring these, our experience has been pretty good. Quality of support is great.
--
While linking to [2] I realised that Scaleway's own website is behind Cloudflare, which is disappointing given they have their own DDoS protection[3].
[1]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente
Businesses generally shouldn't be trying to fight ideological battles, they should just be trying to meet their customers' needs. As long as they're not doing anything immoral/illegal like engaging in discrimination or dumping toxic waste.
Risk = (probability of it happening) x (cost when it happens)
That a man/administration decides to cut off, or take hostage, or tax, online services because they are hosted on their premises, but benefits to/operates for "once good friends but now very unfriendly, bad, incompetent, the worst people", this is definitely not a law of nature.
But, that he/they decide to trigger absurd actions with long-lasting damaging consequences, while not a law of nature, that happened more often than not in the past 12 months than in the whole century before. Or, granted, maybe not "absurd", but definitely "not in line with a century of rather predictable behaviour".
So... you'd be rational to consider that the risk has moved from "low" to "med high" or "high" category in a lot of areas you do not control.
If the customer disagrees, fine: their business, not mine. My duty stops at notifying and documenting the risk.
As proven by Huawei, ingenuity can go a great way when friendships go sour.
Companies are nothing without their employees.
Naturally shareholders would rather have robots.
The point I'm trying to make is that going from zero to hero, even with basically "infinite" money like Google has is very very very hard.
The tricky part is how many organizations have an enormous amount of business logic programmed into excel sheets.
The Engineers: Word processor with basic features is fine
Management and Execs: Comments, Review, Multi-user editing, History, Tables, change tracking.
Marketing: Image placement and alignment, layers, embedding, templates, shapes
Research/Doc Writers: Table of contents, page numbering, cross-referencing, formula insertion, citations, figure tables, export to pdf
All customers (at some point): Layout, margins, padding, spellcheck
As engineers we tend to think "just deliver a simple word processor". For who?
But then some corporate IT guy mandated everything had to be using managed AWS services in some three tier dev-test-production setup, despite having no prior experience with that on either side. Cost went up at least 25-fold, the development sucked, new deployments took 30? minutes minimum (because now everything has to run through some build-system I did not control and I had to manually copy keys around every time). I left the company, but I think the product exists to this day with less than 1000 customers. Nothing my 4 GB VS could handle...
If you just want dedicated servers/VPS the choice is much wider still and plenty of providers on comparison sites and so on.
I guess we must be living on different planets. I have recently deployed a Django application for a client of mine on Scaleway (due to an existing partnership we preferred using them over other infrastructure). Scaleway right now (you can signup and check it out) offers:
* container registry - build an push your containers there
* ECS/Fargate equivalent - tell it to run N instances of your aforementioned container
* Managed Postgres & Redis with failover/replication
* VPC - put your managed DBs and containers there so they can talk over a private network
* S3-compatible object storage
What more do you need exactly? That's essentially all I would use from the incumbent cloud providers anyway.
Pub/Sub, Dataflow, CDN, GLB to name a few. I could go on with the list of services currently used by the people that pay to push buttons.
Not to sound offensive, but others have more than a Django app that they need to run.
I too can build an engineering playground where every ingress byte traverses as many AWS services as I can find. But if you're building a business application, how many of these do you actually need?
Once you have the basic primitives you can fill in the gaps yourself if needed. But in the list you provided, Pub/Sub, CDN and GLB is already covered actually.
I'm sure in due time other services will be covered if there's enough demand, but to claim there is no EU alternative while the basics (app server + DB + S3, aka the most difficult to scale/operate yourself) are covered is a bit misleading I think.
I gave a real list, and all of them have real reasons for being used. I don't know from where you got the idea that apps are built just by chaining cloud services aimlessly.
A company has more than one application or need.
While I’m sure there are legitimate uses for the services you mentioned, I’ve also witnessed plenty of engineering playgrounds where complexity was a feature and services were used for the sake of it rather than due to a specific need.
Cloud is convenient but don't expect any kind of availability you can actually rely on. If you actually need that, you're gonna have to go multi-cloud or self-managed bare-metal at multiple providers anyway.
Bare metal is pretty much the same story: you can host it at different providers, but scaling that and maintaining coherence between data centers is not an easy feat as it might sound.
And seriously now, no sane provider is willing to cover your losses if they go do down. On the other hand, it's not a secret this is not happening and you can take this into account in your risk management strategy.
After years and years, Amazon now has an offering to shield you from when us-east-1 goes down. Funny, no?
Multi-region within the same provider won’t shield you against unknown shared dependencies on a single point of failure (AWS console auth still relies on credentials being checked in a single region if I remember right).
And yes fully agreed that maintaining consistency between active-active regions (whether cloud or bare-metal) is super hard and not worth it for most deployments. Active-standby with point-in-time-recovery and an acceptable data loss window is much easier - when one region is confirmed down, someone throws a switch and the standby becomes active.
> no sane provider is willing to cover your losses
Agreed, but thats why all those who justify the 10-90x premium of the cloud over bare-metal are full of it - that premium is not actually worth it.
> it's not a secret this is not happening
Maybe for you it’s not a secret? Literally every thread tries to justify cloud reliability and their resulting markups. Well if it’s that reliable they’d put their money where their mouth is.
No. If you go multi-region, you use the same tooling, same terraform modules and logic and so on. There's little plumbing needed to make it work. And latency wise this is not an issue in most cases, since most of the requests are covered by the CDN anyway. And you don't have to duplicate everything.
If you go multi-cloud you need to learn a whole new set of systems. And that is expensive. Both in terms of operating and people - because you will need more.
> Agreed, but thats why all those who justify the 10-90x premium of the cloud over bare-metal are full of it - that premium is not actually worth it.
You get charged a premium for convenience. And a high enough chance you don't have downtime.
> Maybe for you it’s not a secret? Literally every thread tries to justify cloud reliability and their resulting markups.
Cloud is reliable if you are willing to spend some money to benefit from that reliability and convenience.
---
Besides this, another thing where cloud saves you money is compliance. They have all the right attestations in place to make your audits go easy. If you self-host on bare metal, you're going to spend a lot of time to be compliant with various regulations. Maybe if you're a small company, you don't have that much compliance you need to do. But once you grow a little, those immutable Stackdriver logs are a godsend when you're asked to prove logs have not been tampered with.
It is also the wide array of services -- well integrated into their primitives of security, authentication, governance, monitoring and logging, etc
Is there a EU cloud provider that provides -- even if limited to EU geography -- the equivalent of Blob Storage + Azure Data Lake Storage + Azure Data Factory or Fabric + Microsoft Foundry with native access to OpenAI and Anthropic models?
The more I work (started coding 40 years ago, and data engineering 25 years ago), the more I favor designs that are less coupled to cloud features.
If you do so, the offering in the EU just as it is now is well enough to scale.
In short: more computer science, less delegating to cloud operators, stronger designs.
A lot of the justification for moving away from own datacenters and heavy in-house engineering teams actually makes sense to organizations of many shapes and sizes. If the core business is not technology -- it is hard to stay invested in a in-house cloud-agnostic engineeringc capability.
The world has more or less accepted this reality and adopted the services like S3 and managed databases, and tight integration with the likes of Microsoft Entra/Purview/Sharepoint/O365 etc for ready-to-use business integrations. Prying organizations away from taht convenience is going to be hard. But the current environment cretaed due to lack of trust in US could the strongest motivator ever to push businesses and nations in that direction. I reckon it will be a long and painful process though.
I also prefer to design solutions that are portable and platform independent, cloud providers simplify and hide something to you, it has a cost (not just money) that you cannot quantify on long term and that's clear for who has experience in both worlds.
- develop something internally and support it
- use a cloud provider offering, fire it up and forget about it
The choice was pretty straightforward.
Boring technology goes a long way.
I don't know what you mean by native access to frontier models. Who has native access to these frontier models?
AJAX did so much heavy lifting here.
WTF would it need to match? It only needs to be as good as Office 97, but online.
but the resulting 'hyperscaler' systems are built around lockin and loss of sovereignty. rather than bemoan the cost of replicating the US environment, wouldn't it make sense to come with a different spin? maybe one thats not so tightly integrated and siloed? isn't AWS just a mirror the the same US dominance that you're trying to avoid?
for example, despite the amount of snark thrown towards the development of open standards, wouldn't it be really quite useful is there weren't 3-4 hyperscalers with different APIs for the same basic services? couldn't we design an EC2-lite that allowed for real commoditization and competition?
ignoring that, consider the value of rethinking things a little bit so that the important part - easy and incremental access to compute are preserved and all the sleazy business practices aren't.
We now have a generation of people who have no idea how to use computers, just how to operate aws.
But there is also no requirement for... most of their specific offering to start an online business.
Some people seem to miss this in the picture: you _can_ build without them, outside of them, and fund equivalent technology development while staying outside of them.
It's a matter of strategy and of choice.
You can start a business in your laundry room if you know how to set up servers and get internet and stuff. But that's gonna be you and maybe a few "hobbyists" that might want to join on that endeavor, but the rest of developers or admins will want to stay far away from that.
Optimizing your business for how is easy is to find talent is also a matter of strategy.
And that means knowing your 0's and 1's better than knowing how to operate the latest trendy calculator: it's easier to understand the calculator, when you know what it's made of; harder to work your way backwards, although doable.
Yes, finding people that master PostgreSQL clustering (and SLA/RTO tradeoffs) is harder than finding AWS-certified folks, but that deeper knowledge definitely pays off: you understand the tradeoffs why, before you migrate, not after. When you know the fundamentals, you learn their implementation way faster.
The "wildly used", locked-in services are more often than not, built with/over the "niche", no-strings-attached ones.
I don't think it can - dependence on US digital infrastructure grew at a time where American stability was taken as ground truth.
How can an EU leader sit across the negotiating table from a country that can delete (if not read/alter) all of their data, and a willingness to exercise that access?
Even if Trumpism goes away, to know for a certainty that Americans won't do it again one election cycle seems like it will take a long time to establish.
If you use AWS for object storage: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/object-storage-pro...
If you use SES: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/transactional-emai... (but hosting your own is also a viable option)
CDNs: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cdn-content-delive...
There isn't any single provider that can match each and every AWS service. But for subsets of services there are options.
If there's a specific AWS service that you cannot get anywhere else but do absolutely need, that's vendor lock-in. Would it be fair to blame EU companies for your bad decisions?
Based on your comment you probably aren't gonna discuss in good faith but move the goalposts each time.
Whether you can switch from AWS to an EU alternative depends solely on how deep down the rabbit hole you are. If you're just looking for basics to host your stuff, you can. If you want to never have to touch Linux but to rely solely on proprietary abstractions on top of Linux, you can't.
What you've linked to is a broad scope site listing a multitude of EU based products and services, making it look like you cant even list ONE let alone a few .
Don't pull the 'moving the goalpost' nonsense, the original post you replied to made it very clear they were talking about an AWS comparison, and a cursory glance at the 'cloud providers' section of that site shows a bunch of EU hosting providers offering general VPS hosting, which isn't remotely close to being the same kind of thing.
I can see it coming already, no point in extending this thread
My usecase is:
- MySQL (using Aurora but really dont need to), hands off like it is on RDS so yeah a managed service would be preferred.
- 2x VM instances with internal networking and an EFS drive connecting the two (The efs drive is critical for a ton of applications)
- Load balancer
- S3 + Cloudfront for CDN
And a few more bits I appreciate are very niche to my usecase but would be nice to keep under the same vpc:
- SQS queue workers (can switch to something redis based if needed)
- SES mail service (again can switch to another 3rd party as i doubt many people offer this)
- Lambda for some app specific background processing
Hopefully this kinda explains my position. Yes, I can split a lot of this out into multiple individual providers who specialise in just that one thing. And perhaps that's the way to go. But I dont think you can deny it's a heck of a lot more convenient to have all of it in one place.
Object Storage as a replacement for EFS, or CIFS if its a legacy server app, or if you hate yourself: NFS.
Theres options here, but thats the only real snag.
For the CDN, I’d go with Bunny, its not in the same suite but its actually better than AWS CDN anyway.
They may not have every single thing that AWS has but you can build solid infrastructure on top of those.
And yet they _still_ don't have a desktop client for hotkey-driven and very fast-paced workflows, meaning that any serious professional spreadsheet work is still a Microsoft monopoly. If even the US market with all its favorable conditions can't deliver a competing product after years of trying, a fragmented, brain-drained, overregulated and high-tax continent attempting the same is just hopes and dreams.
It is even the same as Office for Mac is not 100% compatible with office for windows (or so called CoPilot AI whatever)
The difference between us is that I know I'm within 0,1% of people that actually cases about this specific use case.
Maybe I'm not enough of a power user, but these things often sound to me like the 0.1% productivity boosts that are nice to have, but often hardly relevant in the grand scheme of things.
Proton seems to have stick. It's far less feature full than google doc but I started to receive link to proton doc outside of a immigration context.
Also, I do spreadsheet for a living and my last two job were not providing a office licence ( no need )
This is FUD, 1990s Micro$oft style. I guess nothing particular changed on this front.
The monumental task of ripping out the IT systems they have built up over the last few decades, to move away from the US will actively threaten the existence of some of these companies.
People are living in a fantasy land where e.g. Germany has an enormous automotive industry which can be arbitrarily regulated and still be profitable enough to keep the German economy afloat. This is non longer the case and many EU companies are currently struggling for their existence.
I mean, once you have managed SQL, managed k8s, serverless, object storage, private networks, kafka, sqs, sns, glacier, and IaC support, you can already be happy as a startup
Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states has increased the last 10 years. I have less and less hope that we’re able to set the right free market conditions for real competition to happen.
That doesn’t mean that won’t be alternatives to American offerings, but most probably will come from somewhere else (Singapore, China, Taiwan…)
Just as a curiosity, what exactly are those "right free market conditions" and where have those been successfully implemented before? Because I think most of us (Europeans) are desperately trying to avoid replicating the American experiment, so if that's the "right free market conditions" I think we're trying to avoid those on purpose.
But maybe you're thinking of some other place, then I'm eager ears to hear what worked elsewhere :)
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
Bureaucratisation in the realm of business is much smaller in most relevant ways for most enterprises in China as well.
In China, if the five-year plan prioritizes something, businesses will be up and running in months. In France, if the French parliament enacts a law prioritizing something, businesses still have to fight individual departments or local governments that have their own ideas about how they should regulate it.
Don't confuse bureaucracy for authoritarianism.
Having worked for these Cloud providers China has consistently used bureaucracy to exfiltrate Cloud technologies and to tip the scales of effectiveness of offerings through levers with China Telecom/Unicom. Analyzing the backbone, you could see it in real time.
China basically offsets its bureaucracy by doing the one thing Europe has not done so far in this space: overtly hurt foreign competitors. It doesn't matter how superior your offerings are if the end customers end up throttled creating a less desirable experience than the less-featured, stable domestic competitor.
Unfortunately - the elephant in the room is China got to where it was by being overtly adversarial with the US from the jump after 2010 which translated to a number of anti-competitive measures. The EU's in a spot because it's mostly responding to Trump and a poorly written US law. The US and EU are weird friends in that we could both exfiltrate each other's tech, patents, and industrial assets and move on with business but that's not actually what either side actually wants.
AFAIK domestic companies operating in China don’t have to endure anywhere near the amount of red tape that EU companies typically do when operating in the EU.
I.e., complying to GDPR means you can’t comply to cybersecurity laws.
US has less of those.
For instance, one of GDPR's 6 lawful bases for processing data is in order to comply with legal obligations.
If you're going to make strong claims like that, the onus really is on you to give specific examples.
GDPR and cybersecurity laws are designed to be compatible, not mutually exclusive, but I'm sure there are edge-cases. Still, what exact situation did you find yourself in here in order to believe they're mutually exclusive?
Usually they do. European company processing personal data of non-EU customers falls with article 3(1) "This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not."
Of course if they do not process any personal data then it wouldn't apply but that's pretty unlikely (and if that was the case the EU customers data wouldn't fall within GDPR either).
Of course, as someone else mentioned, that is not an argument against EU sovereignty but rather one of its motors.
None of these things matter. They're trivially set aside. All that matters is how many insane threats the US Gov keeps making. Hopefully as many as possible. This is what creates demand, and from demand, everything else follows automatically.
Like, how can you not see this based on recent events? I'm willing to bet a house that in Feb 2026 there will be much more relative movement from US to EU clouds than in Feb 2015. Despite all of that "increased bureaucracy".
Until you factor in the salaries of the new employees you have to hire now, the cost of that hiring process, the compliance and security implications of operating servers on your premises, the ongoing maintenance of the software and operating systems, the new infrastructure to maintain, including but not limited to backup power supply and overall redundancy, the need to manage the lifecycle of the new hard- and software, the documentation for all of this… I could go on for a while.
It's not like these cloud solutions are just solving laziness.
Compliance and security testing does not go away just because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have extensive requirements regardless if you implement it yourself or buy it from an external supplier.
I would also not recommend to go with a single cloud solution with no backup solution and overall redundancy, unless a $5 voucher is good enough compensation for the service being down a whole day. The general recommendation after the latest waves of outages was for cloud users to use multiple cloud providers and multiple backup solution. It is just like how on-premise solutions need off-premise backups.
That’s a bit disingenuous. If I don’t operate a physical server rack, I also do not need to take care of physical access control, fire suppression policies, camera monitoring, key handling, and a wide range of other measures I would be otherwise obliged to take care of under GDPR. You can absolutely outsource classes of problems. What’s true is that that doesn’t lift the responsibility from you to check your cloud provider fulfils these obligations, but that’s very different from having to fulfil them yourself.
This would be part of the responsibility of the cloud managers, which need to be hired, paid and trained, on top of the cost of paying the cloud providers. There is no free lunch.
What can we definitive say about the difference be in salaries, training, and team size? Can we say anything specific about legal and operational perspective?
I get what you are saying, that responsibility is still yours for making the correct choices, and to know what the cloud providers are doing. In the real world though hardly anybody cares, even though we have threats like the CLOUD act in place. So, yeah, people should care but ultimately they often don't.
For example micro services. You do not need infrastructure heavy software paradigms for large majority of use cases but it was just blindly accepted as new standart which we are now, again, moving away.
These used to be the skills of a generalist sysadmin for a small-site with on-prem services.
Those skills are no longer available on the market. Students in the local apprenticeship program have one class about hardware, and they don't even touch it, just talk about it.
Please provide a list, no sarcasm. And please don’t put Hetzner on it, as it is not a cloud provider.
In what way are they not a "cloud" provider? Because their managed services portfolio isn't as wide as AWS or Azure? What about Scaleway's services then?
Hetzner has an S3 compatible offering, a VPS offering and that's it. Their core business is renting physical servers. And I see lately they offer a load balancing service.
I'm talking about IBM mainframes.
Eventually, as the Internet (networking) and open source technologies (like Git and Linux) become more and more widespread, people realized they could build their services by combining products from different vendors (not to mention FOSS). I'm talking about the 1990s-2000s.
Now, after 20-30 years, we're thinking that the same company must provide the entire tech stack or lose relevancy as a provider.
To be clear, AWS and mainframes are pretty different from a technical standpoint, but I do wonder if we're kinda repeating the same cycle over and over. Asking the same company to provide everything and then build stuff with different products, to then find a new company which can provide everything and so on.
It's one thing to say that a lot of AWS/Azure/Google users take advantage of many managed services.
But saying something is not a cloud provider because they don't provide a specific SaaS is kinda weird, especially if you read the NIST definition of cloud computing or when you consider that not every AWS user is using more than a handful of services (does that make AWS a cloud provider only for more "advanced" users?).
Sure, smaller cloud providers don't usually have all those services, but this doesn't mean they are not cloud providers. They cannot attract users who are more familiar with specific managed services, but they can probably satisfy the needs of other users who are more than happy with a smaller feature set.
Also, limiting yourself to a smaller portion of AWS/Azure/GCP services can facilitate migrations to other cloud platforms (think AWS -> Azure or viceversa), because you're less tied to specific proprietary tooling.
I think for most business stakeholders it's not about the number of services but rather the coverage of business-critical needs. When you have access to Azure Entra, you know that you can cover 90%+ of your auth needs with that service. If you have access to AWS S3, you know that your various storage needs would be possible to cover with that. If a managed Postgres is available, you know that most of the IT systems you run would be able to take advantage of that. You look at Azure their IAM/audit/observability offerings and it's the same.
When you look at Hetzner as a business stakeholder, all you see are bare servers and and one object storage service that you are not sure of how battle-tested it is. And then you start thinking: "okay, I will need to run k8s or some other workload orchestration approach, my IT systems need Postgres/MySQL/SQL Server etc, I need auth, I need audit, I will need to build, operate, maintain all of that in-house". I am not saying that this is a wrong path for everyone, but Hetzner essentially leaves you no choice. And many business stakeholders who have been operating their own own-prem infra or colocated or rented IaaS plus a large dev team for decades and have since switched to one of the hyperscalers and reduced their dev/IT headcount - may not want to go back to the old model.
> limiting yourself to a smaller portion of AWS/Azure/GCP services can facilitate migrations to other cloud platforms.
Yes, which is why you insist (where possible/reasonable) on Postgres-compatible DBMS offerings, IdP solutions based on OIDC, observability on OpenTelemetry.
> Sure, smaller cloud providers don't usually have all those services, but this doesn't mean they are not cloud providers
Yes, it could mean that they are not cloud providers.
> but they can probably satisfy the needs of other users who are more than happy with a smaller feature set
Please see the linked article. This is essentially "users who are happy to build some of the furniture themselves".
I agree that there is a difference between "wood" and "furniture".
Although maybe a more apt comparison is IKEA vs another furniture store.
With IKEA you have a relatively basic "style". You'd be hard to pressed a 1800 style table, for example, but if you are a student or someone who just wants to live in a new place, it's a pretty solid store to go. However, they give you the pieces (not just basic wood, already pre-made pieces) and you have to put them together.
Other furnitures have a lot more choices in terms of styles and they allow you to just buy stuff without any DIY needed.
Different offerings in the same space (no one in IKEA is asking you to cut wood and make your own chair legs or whatever), both valid.
Furniture metaphores aside, what I'm saying is that there is a subset of users which is completely fine with those services, which are still provided in a self-service, pay-per-use way without the need to have admin rights over the entire platform. That's a cloud provider. A more limited one, sure, but it can still be a cloud provider.
And when it comes to business stakeholders, coverage is important, but so are other concerns, including the ability to move out when needed (which still requires some sensible technical choice, because if you go "all in" you're complicating your exit strategy), or even concerns like the ones mentioned in the OP.
Obviously, each company has its own risk aversion and its own decision making process, and so far market share heavily favors the Big Three even outside of the US, but this doesn't mean alternative options should be dismissed as "not cloud providers" just because they don't provide all those 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.
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)
First assumption is that there are no alternatives so you can't replace Excel as a software. Obvious ones for Excel - LibreOffice, Collabora, OnlyOffice or Grist (which i highly recommend). The paradoxical problem is there is no clear THE ONE so organizations get into decision paralysis and never move anywhere.
The other assumption is that even if there were alternatives people will not adopt them. In reality this is rarely issue. Turns out users/employees/students actually don't care much what software they have to use. They just use what is available or what they are told to use. So the reason why people use MS Office is actually because it's mandated from the top. Lawyers use it because state/gov/court communication requires it. Students use it because they need to submit thesis in MS Word. It's socially locked in.
I've been at a university which switched over the summer from MS Office to LibreOffice. The results were boring. 40k people just adopted it, no drama, some liked it more (works on linux yay), took some people few weeks to learn/adjust. People are used learning new things.
So can we stop with that story that 40 year old software which barely changed in last 20 years can't be replaced?
This whole digital sovereignty is i think extremely scary proposition for Microsoft because just as they are now mandated solution by most western world... they are one law away (all state/university communication must be with libre software) to be on the other side of their current mandate / lock in.
Speaking of OnlyOffice, I've seen it crop up more and more lately and apparently it's Latvian, so maybe that will be the one eventually. Though my experience with it has been that it's not very stable (lots of crashing around embedding video anyway) and has a smaller feature set.
Also, Collabora office looks really great too.
EDIT: I just re-tried Proton docs and spreadsheets - much improved docs, and I think the spreadsheets are a new feature; looks OK but I am on mobile right now so minimal testing.
[1] https://thepaypers.com/payments/news/eu-considers-developing...
What is unclear to me atm, is it possible to rent a car using wero? Also, can I pay online with it?
So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)? What's that supposed to solve?
Also, fuck apps. I had to set up an app for my mother to recharge her new hybrid car and I am not joking: at one point I had to create a log in for her and was greeted by a screen with two options: Log In (blue button, white text), and Log In (white button, blue text). I would rather use cash than an app (and I'm in Belgium, carrying around cash is like herding sheep through coyote territory).
Unsure what you mean, but for context I use an app developed by a consortium of local banks and it works by scanning a QR code. Indeed, I use an Android phone but my next one will be a de-googled one like a Fairphone with /e/OS. Hopefully the same app will work there...
That's the problem: currently many of those banking apps in the EU require having a phone with Google Play services and other "security" stuff that makes you reliant on American companies, like the post you're replying to claims.
My brother actually was part of deal in talks to have UPI pilots as a project within London as a project within his college and I remember him talking about how UPI (India) is in talks with other European countries too.
With the mother of all deals recently signed between EU and India. I sincerely hope that UPI can have access within EU markets too.
If you ever come to India, you can witness the astronomical rise of UPI. From street vendors to literally everybody now has UPI and it has 0 fees and is really great/one of the best.
As for our brazillian friends, I have heard that pix is great too and I have respect to pix as well plus its open source as well. Both Pix and UPI are really great.
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.
No, the gatekeeping is done by local banks and governments to protect their oligopolies/cartels.
There are many instant-pay apps across Europe and they are intentionally not interoperable outside of local markets. Each local banking oligopoly is trying to fence off competition. The main fear is from smaller neo-banks.
If you are pointing the distinction between gatekeeping at the EU level and country level I am not contesting that. It's clear though that the gatekeeping is the problem here (and in many other industries in EU).
That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense? How did Visa & Mastercard manage to go through the "protectionism of EU countries" then?
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.
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...
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.
As a private citizen given the cold blood murders of US citizens by ICE, it seems EU citizens should really be worried of what such an administration is willing to do and can do to their long time allies.
Buildings full of computers aren't that difficult a problem to solve compared to things like semiconductor manufacturing or energy.
Perhaps the issue is more on the software and architecture side. Getting sucked into weird cloud products that don't translate clean to other premises is perhaps the more difficult aspect of this for larger firms. I've made a very strong point to only use EC2, Route53, S3 and Azure AD. Moving between environments is a lot easier when you stick with the VM as the unit of deployment. Getting out of something like a MSSQL hyper scale instance is simply not possible without switching to a different SQL provider or accepting new operational risks.
Note that I don't consider it at all relevant whether one agrees/disagrees with the content of their speech.
That is indeed true. OP fails to raise a single point that either makes sense or is grounded on reality. Sometimes I wonder where consuming propaganda stops and wilful ignorance starts.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
You are the lowest form of vermin.
If you mean to say that OpenStack is made by Huawei, that is not true. They are a major contributor and a platinum member of that open source project, though.
Could you say a few more words on this - it sounds quite concerning.
Here is the timeline of Huawei's ban and restrictions in the EU and UK:
Phase 1: Initial Restrictions and Voluntary Guidelines (2019–2020) May 2019: The United States places Huawei on a trade blacklist, restricting access to key technologies (Google Android, US chips), which triggers security reviews across Europe.
January 2020: The European Commission launches its "5G Security Toolbox," encouraging EU member states to restrict or exclude "high-risk vendors" (HRV) like Huawei from critical core network infrastructure.
July 2020 (UK): The UK government announces a total ban on buying new Huawei 5G equipment after December 31, 2020, and orders the removal of all existing Huawei 5G gear by 2027.
October 2020 (Sweden): Sweden bans Huawei and ZTE from 5G networks and orders the removal of existing equipment by January 2025.
Phase 2: Implementation Hurdles (2021–2023) 2021-2022: Many EU nations slow-walk the implementation of the 5G toolbox, with only a small number of countries actively banning Huawei from core networks due to costs and dependence on its technology.
June 2023: EU officials express frustration that only one-third of EU countries have implemented restrictions on high-risk vendors.
Phase 3: Hardening Stance and National Bans (2024–2025) July 2024 (Germany): After years of delays, Germany announces an agreement with major operators to remove Huawei and ZTE critical components from 5G core networks by the end of 2026, and from access/transport networks by 2029.
August 2025 (Spain): Spain cancels a government contract with Telefonica involving Huawei equipment. November 2025 (EU-wide): The European Commission pushes for a binding, mandatory ban, threatening to make the 2020 voluntary guidelines legally required for all member states.
Phase 4: Proposed Mandatory EU-Wide Ban (2026) January 20, 2026: The European Commission unveils a new proposal aimed at forcing EU member states to remove Huawei and ZTE from their networks within three years of adoption.
January 2026: Reports indicate the EU may move to ban Huawei and ZTE from critical infrastructure, including fixed-line and fiber networks, not just 5G. Summary of Key Country Timelines
UK: New equipment banned (Dec 2020), full removal by 2027. Sweden: Full 5G ban, removal by Jan 2025. Germany: Core removal by end of 2026, RAN removal by 2029. EU (General): Proposed 3-year mandatory phase-out starting from 2026
Must say, tech that has held up for all that time, must be doing something right.
So this cloud ride, the possibility of a whole new paradigm in computing could happen before we see EU cloud centricity.
I think you should pause for a moment. There are plenty of European cloud providers that allow you to run VMs in multiple points of presence across the world. Some even offer managed Kubernetes clusters.
It is true that most European cloud providers don't offer many high-level managed services such as function-as-a-service compute solutions, durable execution engines, etc. However, those are not exactly hard requirements. In fact, some cloud providers offer these services for reasons that are not in line with the customer's best interests, such as better hardware utilization and vendor lock-in.
So think about it for a second: if you can put together a Kubernetes cluster, what high-level service do you absolutely need to be able to put together a working service?
I can tell you right away: nothing.
> 2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage;
I think you need to touch grass on this one. European companies require cloud services for the same reason any other company requires cloud services. If you take the time to learn about how cloud providers such as AWS market their services, you will learn that they firmly base their offering on the exact criteria you are arguing against: compute that scales, and reliability. To argue otherwise, you must argue against how US cloud providers market themselves, which would be baffling.
> 4. If push comes to shove, the EU is critically dependent (...)
There is no "if". We are already at that point. NATO is already running military exercises without the US, and since Trump took over support for Ukraine has been driven primarily by Europe. NATO has been very vocal in how France and the UK have been the primary providers of intelligence to Ukraine.
> 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
You got to be joking. The US now demands access to your social media accounts as precondition to enter the country, and the US also outright disappears people out of the street.
Agreed that K8s helps a lot. But let's say I want managed Redis or MongoDB Atlas, I can't get that, at least I couldn't when I last checked (I can them physically hosted in the EU of course, but on a hyperscaler)
> that they firmly base their offering on the exact criteria you are arguing against: compute that scales, and reliability
Sure these are central, but I can also get e.g. computer vision, distributed queues etc.; a lot of money has gone into the software, not just the hardware is my point.
I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.
IMO even Americans should take a look at whether they need to be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Digital Ocean, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of course, but I'm American and moved off of Azure last year due to the price and the complexity it encourages.
Reposting my comment from another thread on the same topic a few days ago:
> This is why I moved off of Azure and over to Hetzner's US VPS's. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, some relatively complex .NET web apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity; I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it.
I do tech DD work for investment funds etc and one thing I often see are slow, complex and expensive AWS-heavy architectures that optimize for problems the company doesn’t have and often will never have. In theory to ensure stability and scalability. They are usually expensive and have nightmarish configuration complexity.
In practice complexity tends to lead to more outages and performance issues than if you had a much simpler (rented) bare metal setup with some spare capacity and better architecture design. More than half of serious outages I have seen documented in these reviews came from configuration mistakes or bugs in software that is supposed to manage your resources.
Nevermind that companies invest serious amounts of time in trying to manage complexity rather than remove it.
A few years ago I worked for a company that had two competing systems. One used AWS sparingly: just EC2, S3, RDS and load balancers. The other went berserk in the AWS candy shop and was this monstrosity that used 20-something different AWS services glued together by lambdas. This was touted as “the future”, and everyone who didn’t think it was a good idea was an idiot.
The simple solution cost about the same to run for a few thousand (business customers) as the complex one cost for ONE customer. The simple solution cost about 1/20 to develop. It also had about 1/2500 the latency on average because it wasn’t constantly enqueuing and dequeueing data through a slow SQS maze of queues.
And best of all: you could move the simpler solution to bare metal servers. In fact, we ran all the testing on clusters of 6 RPIs. The complex solution was stuck in AWS forever.
Heck their support is shit too. I have talked to them to figure out an issue on their own in house software, they couldn’t help. My colleague happened to know what was wrong and fixed the issue with a switch of a checkbox.
I use Coolify for side projects, haven’t investigated whether I’d want to use it for bigger/importanter stuff.
I want a 1985 Mercedes that is build like a tank and outlives me.
And in computing, having a bit of downtime 1-2 times per year is often a price worth paying if avoiding it requires 90% more cost and effort. (Of course, people end up having downtime anyway because they have something so complex that they have 100x the number of ways something can fail).
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.
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).
The basic services are more or less the same, but the hyperscalers provide hundreds of services where smaller providers have only ten.
This is just my opinion, but there are some services that just package software as VM and let's you spawn it with a fancy button, leaving you with a largely unmanaged instance.
There are other services like S3, BigQuery or SQS that feels like magic.
It is easy to argue that it is expensive and complex. Since it is. And lots of people have made that argument. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone argue in favor of AWS while skimming the threads here.
So this is your opportunity to make the case for AWS.
Computing at this scale is not marketed to flashy fanbois.
Every vain CxO is a flashy fanboi at heart
Your point's a little moot.
You can see this mechanism at work in the USA itself. Microsoft tried to get into the mobil market, but gave up. Google tried to build its own social network, but gave up. All other cloud providers are stuggeling to catch up with AWS.
This is changing now. So maybe the incentives will now appear more clearly.
There isn’t even an European card brand that operates across the whole continent, the just accepted to use visa and Mastercard for everything. I hope they change it.
1. https://tech.eu/2026/01/20/the-european-commission-launches-...
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?
IMO here in the UK we are good at starting tech startups, we are just bad at not selling them to overseas investors early in their life, or having a tax framework that is advantageous to them growing in the UK.
In the UK see Google Deepmind, ARM, Deliveroo... Elevenlabs being incorporated in the USA, Dyson moving to singapore etc - Even outside of the tech space, Cadburys, Sainsbury's, Jaguar Land Rover... If the UK kept hold of everything that the UK created, we would be great!
Even our infrastructure we sell to the French, Chinese, Germans etc just for short-term gain, despite that we are cutting our nose off if we look forward 10 years.
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.
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
Deutsche Telekom: $1BDoes a store of healthcare records need AI? The state portal for renewing passports? The tax administration?
I seemed to be able to use all of these things online before the latest boom in AI came along.
So if Europe will rely on US AI infrastructure, nothing is won by moving the old CPU bound processes off of US cloud infrastructure.
Given Europe's productivity gap with the US, they appear they are becoming even further a vassal. They will survive, but they further lose their leverage with each year. We see this in international politics as the US pivots away from Europe and towards Asia. (Although Russia's decline has also made it less necessary too)
If you want Europe to rejoin 'great powers', as 'survival', yes they need AI.
Are there really any customers who are demanding AI and threatening to leave if those AI features are missing in every tech adjacent product ?
I think the make or break situation of integrating cutting edge AI for any business is just the hype and fomo at leadership level.
Both being dependant on ASML, that we're crippling to please our bully, the USA. We probably have more leverage that we want to admit, but that requires a lot of politic will and... planning the economy.
You'll never get here that kind of cash for any risky project, it usually is low risk + low margin.
If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high, burning cash to have a chance hitting jackpot are much much higher than in EU.
In EU you are starting in a single country so like 60M people and your payoff is capped from start at most likely scenario you go big in a single country and then you basically have clean start in next country.
That is the reality of game theory, not some failure of imagination or being scared to take risks - payoff is just not there, in US you have a shot at insane payoff in relatively short term.
The topic is cloud providers. Do you think it would be critical for a EU-based cloud provider to translate their admin GUI to Elfdalian, Basque and Romansh in order to succeed? Or perhaps there are some deeper underlying causes for European failure in modern computer tech that you can think of?
Besides the soure what does he mean with all of Europe: Berlin? London? Paris? Estonia? Sweden? The start up eco system is fragmented / decentralised. I doubt Thiel is a good overview and he argues probably not in good faith anyway.
But I generally have a hard time thinking any person's opinion is some sort of fact.
However, it kind of tracks with my understanding.
because of the investment story about being first and building a moat, we have companies torching 100s of billions of dollars to see who can climb that exponential the furthest.
we have so much work to do, in infrastructure, and distributed computation models, and programmability, quantization, and information theory...just relax a little. you dont have to compete with OpenAI. OpenAI is just a giant waste of money. take your incremental gains and invest in research and I assure you we can get there without directing our entire economic output into buying the latest highest margin parts from Nvidia only to use them at 30%, if you're being generous.
Of course, we are no longer in the clock speed doubling era, but computer does get faster still.
But actually, that's not the goal here. AI, at least the kind of products that need dedicated datacenters ie. generative, isn't critical infrastructure. The focus is on documents, collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign on, databases etc. that are seemingly monopolized by US providers.
All being (or soon to be) fed through LLM agents running on fibers and datacenters controlled by NOT European entieties. And if you build DC you'll be powering them with energy imports.
Software being built on library repositories also under foreign jurisdictions. Network infrastructure built on imported tech running whatever backdoors "partners" see fit.
Its like you didn't notice the snowden revelations, the shift from dependence on Russian Gas to US gas, nordstream sabotage, stuxnet, etc
Quite frankly, there is literally 0 moat and its great to see EU focus on the real moat/lock-in issues.
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.
Agree that society can survive without it though, but seems a weird thing to just claim as useless.
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.
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.
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.
I think Chomsky would have a lot to say about this and the broad manufacturing of consent taking place across Europe.
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.
It's sure worrying to watch a good friend become an enemy. But you won't fix that by swearing off friends entirely.
like what?
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-emai...
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.
Swiss data protection law is an example of this. An Italian municipality could choose to use Infomaniak or Exoscale and increase their sovereignty and privacy.
In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner. And for that, we need education, not regulation.
Clearly shows you have absolutely zero idea about what you are talking about and just take your talking points from people like Elon Musk
But if you want an authority on the subject, look up Yanis Varoufakis and how sovereignty and democracy worked out for Greece when shit hit the fan.
Voters place their trust in representatives who then act on their behalf during the EP voting process and other legislative matters, such as electing the President of the European Commission
There is a “EU company ditches AWS for Hetzner” or “random EU government back office ditches Microsoft for OpenOffice” every few days, but until there’s actually a real European competitor for American tech, it’s all just people online congratulating each other on “We did something to help!” in the same way people post thoughts & prayers messages on Facebook and congratulate themselves for helping after a tragedy.
Yes… I know your tiny startup moved from AWS RDS to hosting Postgres on Hetzner. It’s a grain of sand taken out of the AWS / GCP / Azure beach.
EU doesn’t have the capability or conditions to create a legitimate competitor to American tech, no matter how much they want to politically.
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.
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.
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.
Tell them about the Cloud Act and let those rusty wheels turn a bit. There is no sovereignty when working with a U.S.-based cloud company.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also Hetzner (germany) is super cheap when compared with US hosting providers.
BTW. it's all hosted in the EU if you use it in the EU. Amazon, Google and Azure have data centers all over Europe and using those is not optional for EU based companies. If that wasn't the case, they'd have no business here. Companies legally have to host in the EU and do business with US cloud providers through EU based subsidiaries (mostly based in Ireland. There's a bit of a murky situation with what level of access US intelligence agencies have exactly to all the data or who copies what where and when. But generally, data isn't supposed to leave the continent unless that's needed/required.
I work in Germany. We currently use Google Cloud. It's cheap and convenient enough. Our spend is only 300 euros/month or so. I could replace it. One of our customers insisted on Telekom Cloud; so we support that as well. I've used Hetzner in the past. There are a few other providers. It's not that big of a deal. But it's not a big/urgent issue for us.
However, Vms, object storage, elastic load balancers, managed databases, etc. are all commodities at this point. You don't need to pay AWS 2-3x for that. They aren't magically any better. They certainly aren't any faster. AWS squeezes hard on those VCPUs.
And there's a lot of exotic stuff that some people use. AWS is offering lots of that. But most of those things are a combination of a bit niche and very pricey and more aimed at enterprises than startups. When it comes to GPU hosting, AI stuff, etc. the premium options that Amazon offers really add up really quickly. I'm sure it's fantastic. But many people I talk to in Europe use alternative/cheaper solutions.
For bread and butter hosting, AWS is just expensive and overrated. Big companies don't seem to care much and are sensitive to big brands and the warm fuzzy feeling they get from expensive consultants telling them what to do. And AWS is very good at vendor lock-in. That's also why IBM still exists and why companies like Oracle still do a brisk business separating rich clueless enterprises from their cash. Vendor lock-in is all they have left at this point. But those are at this point the idiot option. AWS is increasingly like that. The times are gone that they are a sane solution for startups. Ten years ago they'd lure you in with "free" hosting for a year and then you'd be hooked for the life time of the startup. But it's not that obvious anymore that is a good choice for cash strapped startups.
Btw. Hetzner now operates in the US. It's a pretty good deal there as well. It's not like you have to give your money to Amazon.
According to AWS calculator the same 4 TB cost 102 Euro/Month with their standard S3 tier.
So I gladly pay 0.3x to store data in Europe, with a European service.
US has their tariffs and last stage capitalism, we have our government enforcement laws.
At least I’m not hiding behind throwaway accounts.
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.
In this environment there is zero chance of an "AWS-like" competitor or anything remotely like it in the tech sector. And if you say "Hezner" I've got a bridge to sell you.
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.
Unless we’re all going to use. Raspberry Pi I’m not sure how this works.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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".
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.
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.
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-en...
In France, if you get 80k net, you do actually get ~160k, half of which is collected/distributed before by your employer to various mutualised funds (health, retirement, unemployment, state taxes, employee benefits, etc.).
And the mechanism is somewhat similar in other EU countries.
Trust me I would love to quit consulting and be able to have a chill permanent job that can afford me a good flat and lifestyle. I'm still searching. Spain situation is very similar last time I ran the numbers.
Definitely no fucking way I'm helping anyone build a cloud provider (a cash cow considering the margins in there) for such pay. If I want to sell my soul to the devil, the one across the pond is gonna give me twice as many bucks for it.
The suburb is quite nice too, if you get a few home-office days. For 4k? you can have a big house+garden at 30min from Paris center (https://www.seloger.com/classified-search?distributionTypes=...)
As a SRE, I got 65k in Nantes before I quit, and I've never had to think about any single expense at all, not once (having kids, house, dog, car, garden). That would still have been quite confortable in Paris (swapping the house for a smaller flat, and without the car/dog/garden though).
And yes, I've walked the talk, so I can say this.
If professionals like you join European companies it will help grow their business and offer competitive salaries.
If they can get top talent for half the salary they won't suddenly start paying more.
There is only one solution: EU governments heavily subsidize those European cloud providers which enables them to offer top salaries and therefore attract top talent.
Every time I look at a permanent role in Europe, if I didn't already close the tab based on the offered salary, I plug the number into a take-home calculator and then I close the tab for sure.
It makes no sense whatsoever to switch from Company A to Company B, you're still just a customer at the vendor's mercy.
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.
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
European governements WILL take your data from "sovereign" clouds
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.
Keeping the data overseas by design would just make this easier.
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."
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.
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.
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).
What did happen?
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.
It's more about not being subjected to the whims of the US. High dependency on US vendors means high leverage for the US administration (export control, sanction, etc.).
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.
Apart from Signal, do you know of an actual US service where things are E2E encrypted, including metadata, that also allows several people working on the same thing at the same time?
> not having the US have access to EU data
It is a great deal about not having US access EU data.
It is also about the US not having the power to cut the EU from essential services.
> This article is more political than logical or technical
Of course this is 100% a political matter (rather than technical). This is not a bad thing. Technical stuff doesn't live in a politic-free vacuum.
> it’s unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive.
And this stance too.
The EU governments do not have free access to data in a non-transparent way. That's the main difference between EU and American laws.
> Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them?
The GDPR lets you store any data in a third country, so long as it's impossible for that country to decrypt the data. E.g. it has to be encrypted before it's transferred.
It just severely limits what you can build, to a degree where it's probably easier to just use a cloud that can be trusted to follow the GDPR.
I work in energy now, and we host stuff in AWS. So far so normal.
However, with the tubthumping about invading greenland, We see that america is willing to evaporate any system that gets in the way of the sun king's world view. Sure, he says now that "we were never going to invade" but given the way you've all just given up your 1st, 4th, 10th and now 2nd amendment, we're not really that sure.
This means that when the next recession happens and the EU is busy competing, he'll ask "hey we subsidies the EU by getting them to pay for AWS, why don't we turn it off?" I mean that sounds far fetched, but so did unrelated personally controlled federal militia roving around states disappearing US citizens without trial.
tldr: you're damn right its about politics. He threatened to invade an ally, we aint hanging around to find out whats next.
Its someone else's computer. The TPM is controlled by someone else. You can't really process on a machine that has a compromised urandom/TPM
Also the bigger issue is having all your access revoked over night. Thats the bigger fear.