People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.
We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra).
And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, people who don’t understand what a VM is and cannot differentiate salesforce from an elastic container, as everything is “cloud”, but heard “50% off”.
If a car salesman told me I could save 50% of my fuel bill from driving their special car a certain way I'd laugh at them.
Further, it needs people in decision making roles who understand and value the strategic differences between having an infrastructure concept that is trapped in one provider's proprietary software tooling ecosystem (aws, azure, etc), vs things built on open standards that are portable.
The original promise of the cloud is "you pay us less than you pay your sysadmins", which is not entirely unreasonable, especially at early stages.
Of course running on bare metal from Europe's own Hetzner is even more cost-efficient, if you already have a lot of sysadmin chops.
Unlike most VPSes
It’s very much not a discount cloud provider. They are costly unlike their physical discount supermarkets.
> Last year, the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) and the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) warned that the Dutch financial sector had become too dependent on foreign IT service providers
I wonder how much if this is a personal choice, and how much is pressure from the government. Banks are famously the first target of politicians, and it's common in China for exec's to publicly choose a national option under pressure from the CPP.
At the very least a country dependent cloud services from multiple other countries is less dependent on any one of them than a country predominantly dependent on one (and most of Europe is currently dependent on US cloud providers).