Well, there are also noises about the SaaS company preferably not being American. Apparently there's a US law that compels US companies to divulge data on their users even if the data is hosted outside of the US. (I'm not sure this wouldn't happen anyway, without such a law.)

It is definitely also about public opinion and it is going to be translated into laws soon enough (i.e. governments mandate data sovereignty).

Recent erratic policies are having a profound effect on perception of US companies.

It has been brewing for a while.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/02/27/is-overreliance-on-...

There been mumblings for as long as I've been a developer, I remember hearing about "EU data independence" first when the ePrivacy Directive came around, which must have been multiple decades ago at this point.

But yeah, in recent times the sentiment became more urgent. If I were to guess, with zero data in front of me and just judging by what I remember, I think the sentiment really changed first with the ICC blockade that happened last year, then it got really fueled on by the US threats to Greenland's sovereignty, I think that's when organizations and people really got stressed out about moving ASAP.

I feel like the concern started getting popularised during the first Trump administration, because the US were overtly bullying the EU (and others of course). But the main change was that it was done overtly: before that the US has always been a big power trying to... say "defend the interests of the US" abroad. E.g. the US have been spying their allies forever. So I think it was more of a "they should stop bullying us in a few years", and indeed it went back to normal with Biden (again, "defending the interests of the US" and "leveraging their dominant position", which was kind of accepted).

The second Trump administration moved from "overtly bullying" to "behaving like a potential threat". In the second Trump administration, the US has used the tech monopolies against the EU and has become a military threat (not to mention the commercial war with tariffs). For many Europeans, it's not that the US are abusing their dominant position in negotiations anymore: it's that they are not an ally anymore. Not that they are seen as an enemy, but rather an unreliable partner who threatened to become an enemy.

I think that this is a very big shift, and that is why things are actually moving. And I don't think that this will change, because the risk of depending on the US monopolies has now materialised. That cannot be undone.

Yeah, AWS even was trying to found a EU sovereign cloud precisely for this reason.

https://aws.eu/

I haven't heard of anyone moving to this, though.

Trump 2 is worse than Trump 1 by far from EU perspective. And it also proved that it wasn't a once-off that Americans will vote in someone who threatens to dismantle NATO, invade Greenland, or start trade wars with allies for no reason.

Trump wasn't threatening to invade European countries and supporting Putin's position in an ongoing war in term 1. He has been far more outwardly anti-EU in term 2.

> EU hosting their own ops like they built the Airbus A380: > Database runs in France, front end in Belgium, Operations in Spain...

You snark, but is this not EXACTLY how a sizeable majority of modern apps are made?

Substitute in some random tech stacks, cloud providers, or buzzwords.

Database runs in AWS, front end in Nuxt, Operations in Claude.

Like NASA rockets don't have components whose manufacture is very carefully distributed over all US states just to keep the senators happy.

In any case, there are plenty of EU giants (ASML, SAP, Siemens, Alstom, Rheinmetall, etc) that are rather concentrated geographically speaking. EU fairness is more a government agency distribution thing, not for private companies.

Isnt that how american contracts work?

You put your Headquarters in seattle, your data center in alabama, you have your dev team in SF... every state gets a slice

Like gov contracts and how they are divided is basically the largest conversation in defense contracts, they give more of a shit who will make the nails for a tank than the security parameters of the crew members

Yeah, I guess we replaced globalism with Europalism, since some of the other parties who initially pushed for globalism now wants nothing to do with it anymore. Oh well, I'm looking forward to closer connections and relationships to our French and Belgian brothers and sisters :)

Better than Boeing, I guess...

An entire continent's sentiment shifting to pull market share away from your team is nothing to snark at, regardless of whether the first iteration works perfectly out of the box. I can guarantee you someone in Europe is smart enough to eventually get their needs sorted.

I think we're going to witness a very inefficient system getting brought to work by policies alone.

And I'm not even bashing EU. The closest example still working today is probably the US's Jones Act.

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Precisely none of it is related to LLMs. It's related to the political situation and the possibility of trade war and tariffs.

Besides some companies that were deep into the weeds of AWS and been pushed to enable and use every single AWS service by their reps, I don't think it's much harder/easier today than it was two years ago.

Sure, LLMs help a bit with the actual typing, but the hard part is still planning, alignment and actual execution, all which are best done by humans talking and working with other humans.

I don't think we're in the days of "Hey Codex migrate our AWS stack 100% to Hetzner VPS stat" yet, without issues along the way. Wouldn't claim it's impossible either, but again the easy parts were already easy, and the hard parts are still hard.

Some. Many companies have relied in the past on the fact that doing things is freaking complicated. Such as maintaining your own services instead of using something from a provider like AWS.

What used to be a half year transition project that will be half-assed due to resource constraints, can now be properly done in a month by a skilled engineering team works on it with LLM leverage.

Of course, if America was still a trusted ally (like if Harris was president), we still wouldn't be doing it. Even if it was easy now.

zero.

It is a manifestation of the commoditization of Cloud Computing Interfaces.

Every provider offers a blob storage, kubernetes clusters, queues and what not.

I'd argue that covers 90% of SaaS needs.

How do LLMs help with the mechanics of switching infrastructure stacks? Does writing code faster make infrastructure swap easier?

And that has never happened to any European company, right? (I'm looking at you ASML.) By your logic, does that mean that most European nations are "no longer the safety many assumed before"?

> Seems like theres room in the market for some kind of an On Prem Private Cloud Stack that emulates GCP/AWS etc but locally maybe?

It's more like cloud-in-a-rack, but that's what https://oxide.computer/ is trying to do isn't it?

From our perspective I'm not sure the cloud abstraction is better or we even want it to be done like that locally. Look at S3 as an API for example. It's absolutely dire. I'd rather use NFS (!). And stuff like Lambda and Cloud Functions are just cat turds.

On the DB side, I can't say too much as we're a pretty obviously identifiable AWS customer if I give out any details. I will only say that nothing fits our size and scale so we have to run on bare metal. That just makes it really fucking expensive colocation.

Those local options exist, and have been around forever, but the problem is nobody is doing it without cutting corners and with pay-as-you-go elasticity (and the 'call an API, get a VM instantly' effects that go with it).

Most on-prem deployments were trash and a lot of them still are. Not because it couldn't be better but because it's easier to just have some random hypervisor department do this work manually and not do the work to create it as an internal product. Even VMware with vrealize failed and that's about as 'customisable cloud platform in a box' as COTS enterprise software can get.

Maybe it's because IaC and APIs were just not in the vocabulary of the average system integrator or on-prem operating team (it's still lots of clickops and copy-paste).

Sounds like HPE GreenLake.

You are likely describing software like Proxmox which has quietly been able to do so much for a long time.

Open source, and works great when small, and at scale.

https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environm...

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=introduction+to...

The USA is threatening war with the the EU and its allies. A loss of trust doesn't quite convey the seriousness of relationship destruction this causes and the monumental shift that is now happening.

The complete disinterest in international allies from the American public is troublesome. I recently was in a discussion about what kind of responsibility we can put on the residents of the US for this situation. A US lawyer answered "well the 25th amendment ties our hands, and we do a lot of protesting so no blame on us". The judgement on US citizens was pretty harsh.

You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.

trust or not, US vs EU or somewhere else, you should be in charge of your data and your data should be subject to your laws and yours alone. It only makes sense.

/lives in the US

We have gained a lot of confidence that having control ourselves is actually enormously valuable.

As a European: yes definitely. And that won't be fixed if you choose a sane administration again. There can always be another Trump. It will take significant time to build trust again.

The fact that you're being downvoted for this shows that Americans are not unaware, but actively in denial instead.

Trump is not the core issue since he isn't a hereditary monarchical dictator.

It's the US population that's the problem, since they voted to put him into power TWICE, which means that they can also do it again, and again, and again, for other candidates not named Trump and not always Republican, but who could be even more unhinged, so we need to do everything to decouple from them so that their election decisions will impact us less.

No offence guys, but you do bare the responsibility of your democratic choices, as do we.