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.)
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.
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.
Naive question: does zero knowledge proof solutions help with this?
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.).
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.
At least I’m not hiding behind throwaway accounts.
Also Hetzner (germany) is super cheap when compared with US hosting providers.
US has their tariffs and last stage capitalism, we have our government enforcement laws.
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 locking. 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 lockin 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.
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.
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...
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.
I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.
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.
I want a 1985 Mercedes that is build like a tank and outlives me.
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.
Computing at this scale is not marketed to flashy fanbois.
Every vain CxO is a flashy fanboi at heart
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.
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 sure worrying to watch a good friend become an enemy. But you won't fix that by swearing off friends entirely.
Clearly shows you have absolutely zero idea about what you are talking about and just take your talking points from people like Elon Musk
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.
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.
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.
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).
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: $1BIt 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.
You'll never get here that kind of cash for any risky project, it usually is low risk + low margin.
Does 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.
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.
Quite frankly, there is literally 0 moat and its great to see EU focus on the real moat/lock-in issues.
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.
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.
That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense? How did Visa & Mastercard manage to go through the "protectionism of EU countries" then?
[1] https://thepaypers.com/payments/news/eu-considers-developing...
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.
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.
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.
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.
European governements WILL take your data from "sovereign" clouds
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.
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.
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.
adrianN•1h ago
nubinetwork•1h ago
adrianN•1h ago
Imustaskforhelp•6m ago
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)
tirant•1h ago
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…)
embedding-shape•1h ago
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 :)
ada0000•58m ago
stefanfisk•46m ago
ada0000•31m ago
creddit•25m ago
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.
hartator•44m ago
I.e., complying to GDPR means you can’t comply to cybersecurity laws.
US has less of those.
stevesimmons•36m ago
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.
closewith•27m ago
embedding-shape•13m ago
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?
azan_•39m ago
deaux•11m ago
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".
moffkalast•53m ago
Zardoz84•50m ago
moffkalast•19m ago
adrianN•34m ago
omnimus•16m ago
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.
Imustaskforhelp•6m ago
Also, Collabora office looks really great too.
bambax•48m ago
jeffrallen•39m ago
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.
9dev•32m ago
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.
Black616Angel•22m ago
hsuduebc2•16m ago
hsuduebc2•19m ago
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.
lucasRW•6m ago
gf000•4m ago