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.
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.
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)).
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.
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.
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 world would break pretty quickly if we all just stopped trading with each other.
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.
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 5-10 years 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 100k 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.
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.
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.
There is almost no chance for that, as lost trust does not return instantly.
The fact is, it didn't last. It was not a one-off. It got worse than before. The lesson that the USA is a country that does this from time to time.
As another US accurately president 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
As proven by Huawei, ingenuity can go a great way when friendships go sour.
If you just want dedicated servers/VPS the choice is much wider still and plenty of providers on comparison sites and so on.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
We now have a generation of people who have no idea how to use computers, just how to operate aws.
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
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.
The difference between us is that I know I'm within 0,1% of people that actually cases about this specific use case.
It is even the same as Office for Mac is not 100% compatible with office for windows (or so called CoPilot AI whatever)
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 )
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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...
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...
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.
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.
I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
like what?
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Unless we’re all going to use. Raspberry Pi I’m not sure how this works.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
And yes, I've walked the talk, so I can say this.
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.
European governements WILL take your data from "sovereign" clouds
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).
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.
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.
Keeping the data overseas by design would just make this easier.
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.
Naive question: does zero knowledge proof solutions help with this?