We already have excellent cloud providers in Europe. But most importantly, most businesses using the cloud would be better off with simple on-prem solutions. So much cheaper to operate and control.

I would say there’s even less chance nowadays to generate a fully private set of European alternatives to American cloud offerings.

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…)

I thought I heard that hetzner was pretty cheap, haven't looked myself though...

Without a viable MS Office/Google Docs alternative it's all rather performative. If those get blocked the entire bureaucratic machine stops dead. Hell block just excel and entire countries might actually collapse.

Comparing EU cloud providers to AWS is like comparing a 1963 Zastava to 2025 high end BYD because both of them are cars and can drive from point A to point B.

>>As a European, I am glad that this is finally discussed in the open! I have made multiple comments in the last weeks that one of the most important things, for me, is an alternative to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.

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.

We are a little misled, on purpose, with the term "sovereignty", though. For instance, if you are a French entity then sovereignty means your data stay in France. Moving things to de facto EU control is the opposite of sovereignty.

ASML & IMEC are European.

Even if you are right and everything is the same regarding surveillance and regulation: there are other important aspects that make the move to move european data out of the US worthwhile.

"Unelected EU bureucrats"

Clearly shows you have absolutely zero idea about what you are talking about and just take your talking points from people like Elon Musk

France cloud provider scalaway has great prices. In some services they are cheaper then AWS. So I think that devs just need to research a bit more.

Also Hetzner (germany) is super cheap when compared with US hosting providers.

'Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM (now Microsoft)' has been an important factor around my neck of the woods. A cheaper European alternative would never even make it to the comparison. That is changing now though.

But those do exist and they are generally a lot cheaper; not more expensive.

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.

What is the cost of storing data in Europe today?

Luckily our friends overseas have shown us the way of dealing with uncompetitive local industries: tariffs.

They certainly will if regulations are part of it.

US has their tariffs and last stage capitalism, we have our government enforcement laws.

Bingo. And for that to happen the EU must be a competitive market. And that doesn’t happen by strangling innovation with a thousand regulations passed down from Brussels by unelected bureaucrats.

I upvoted you. That’s absolutely true for other roles as well. Like hardware design engineers. At US company in Germany one gets real salary. At German big company one will make 2/3 of that salary. People are not stupid, why choose fraction of the salary when one can take it all. There are outliers, but majority will want to work for more than less money.

> Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.

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.

Why should they do something about it? They are not IT people. If you want to switch, do it today. Plenty of options exist.

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.

As opposed to.. the harsh realities of the Bay Area tech scene?

„Cloud“ ist a lot more than blob storage where encryption can help. As soon as you use a service that sees plain text (eg a database saas) encryption doesn’t save you from the service provider (and by extension foreign government). But as the article points out, data exfiltration is one problem, the other, imo bigger, problem is dependence on a foreign nation for critical infrastructure. The US government can decide to shut down almost all European IT and there is nothing Europe can do about it right now.

> Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data

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.).

It is also about not having the US government cutting people off from their data on a whim, such as happened to the International Criminal Court.

> Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them?

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 wonder if someone could make a foss frontend for Google Drive/Dropbox/<insert product here> that transparently encrypts files on your device before uploading them, that would certainly make me worry less about those services.

> unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive

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.

> Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data.

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.

Its past political.

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.

They mean google docs/gmail or office365.

IMHO, this is the EU using current events to push for more power and control for itself over member states in many areas, including new areas like defence. Apparently member states and people are fine with that or even driving it... Turkeys voting for Christmas comes to mind.