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.

Well, if the Zastava had 5-10x the amount of horsepower and storage space of the BYD for the same amount of money. Because that’s what is often the reality. Bare metal is unreasonably efficient compared to cloud services for not that much more know-how.

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.

The Zastava doesn't have a bunch of superfluous computers that track you, is easy to service, and reliable?

But that is what people actually want.

I want a 1985 Mercedes that is build like a tank and outlives me.

Hm, equating AWS to a 1963 Zastava is pretty demeaning to the Zastava. At least the Zastava was cheap junk, not premium-priced junk.

when you compare IT stuff to cars, the discussion pivots to discussing cars, please think twice before using any analogies / comparisons with the physical world

Except 95% of companies have no need of ultra scalable super cloud.

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 think it’s more about the absolutely stripped model vs the loaded one.

The basic services are more or less the same, but the hyperscalers provide hundreds of services where smaller providers have only ten.

Scaleway (maybe upcloud as well) are also great and atleast Scaleway from what I know has many many features and its really competitive with the offerings it provides in general and has many offerings.

Your point's a little moot.

I promise you, a person buying a vehicle for their business will be looking at ROI rather then smart features.

Computing at this scale is not marketed to flashy fanbois.

AWS is overrated junk, got it.