Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers
Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers
Some European cloud companies have seen an increase in business.
The global backlash against the second Donald Trump administration keeps on growing. Canadians have boycotted US-made products, anti–Elon Musk posters have appeared across London amid widespread Tesla protests, and European officials have drastically increased military spending as US support for Ukraine falters. Dominant US tech services may be the next focus.
There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the Internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.
“There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could be weaponized against European interests,” says Marietje Schaake, a nonresident fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a former decadelong member of the European Parliament.
As should have been done already 10 years ago. When it became clear American authorities can seize any information even when stored on servers outside USA, by any American service provider.
And Obama claimed it was a "fair balance".USA has in many ways acted almost like a totalitarian regime for decades, disregarding their own laws, international laws, and especially the laws of other countries, even allies.
This became very clear when Obama stressed that illegal surveillance/monitoring wasn't used against American citizens.
Obviously meaning that citizens of other countries have no rights, and there are no laws preventing American intelligence in any way.As it turned out, what Obama promised wasn't even true, and Americans stationed in for instance Iraq, were very much monitored.
With regard to information of other countries, USA has CLEARLY demonstrated, that they have no regard for decency or even laws.
This was revealed when Obama was president, and the Republicans are even worse!!
USA and EU has made an agreement on this, claimed to make it legal in EU to use American cloud services.
But as we have seen, no American administration gives a fuck about such agreements or even laws, so that agreement isn't worth the paper it's written on.Obama taking no action to dismantle the surveillance state was my biggest problem with his administration. It was so obvious how that surveillance would be abused were it ever to get in the hands of a President with authoritarian tendencies.
And here we are.
Now they've fully eroded the 4th amendment and will use that knowledge to eradicate the 1st.
Yes IMO that part was very disappointing. As I used to say, Obama is an excellent president for USA, but he is still American.
Meaning there are things that we simply don't see the same way.
But as a Dane I can't really complain much about it. Because we were complicit, and helped USA spy against other European countries, for which I am much ashamed.
Wow. This guy hates Obama lol.
What facts did they get wrong?
Anyone who opposes mass surveillance should.
The appeal of someone else's cloud for companies was that it was cheaper because of professionalization. But then enshitification hit and they got more expensive too. And the most sovereign cloud is your own.
But why? There are already a lot of great services based in Europe. For example, Hetzner and OVH. Their product offerings aren't exactly 1:1 w/ those big three, but they have a lot of great tools, and you can get pretty far w/ a DIY approach, you just need to hire some OPs people to manage things. Hetzner even has S3-compatible storage.
I get that there's a lot of interesting abstractions w/ places like AWS, but I'm also of the opinion that a lot of it is unnecessary and just adds cost. Learn to orchestrate things properly and build some tooling to utilize the APIs these cloud services provide, and you can achieve the same thing for less cost.
For lower end, absolutely. For higher end enterprise space? Not so much. For me, AWS is the gold standard for product support and price at enterprise scale, and I do think I have ever worked on an enterprise application that could orchestrate 100% on its own (only for bad reasons, this is what I do at home).
I do hope a lack of reliance on these services leads to better technological solutions to come out of Europe and make its way back to the states. The enterprise made the Faustian bargain with these CSPs, and although the cloud networking is somewhat nice, the applications are a disaster.
price at enterprise scale
Really? I thought that's where big cloud services fleece customers the hardest... We use AWS at work, and I'm always surprised when I ask our devOPs how much we're paying.
My understanding is they're selling the "time is money" angle, where things work together well so you spend less time getting stuff set up.
Maybe we go back to p2p, public key encryption and desktop apps. ipfs can store all the data in the distributed manner and gov can pay citizens for keeping data as a tax exception. But who I am to question building big corporations over and over again.
P2P has insane latency and is not applicable to most industries. It's a decent idea for back ups though. P2P also has insane energy costs. It's not as bad as BitCoins, but it will destroy our planet for sure.
I think that cloud costs are pretty much hidden under the corporate curtain. Things like water usage, energy usage for those 24/7 running servers, amount of servers that are running and not doing anything, finally the environmental impact around those big blocks of servers are pretty much not existent in the media.
Torrent sharing is doing fine.
Also doing same things over and over again because USA have it so Europe must have it to is not the way to go for me. I think Europe need it's own way for technology and have all the bits to do it. I'm not saying that Europe should do the youtube in p2p manner because that's insane but gov administration and countries beurocracy can go p2p.
P2P energy cost will be way less in my opinion. The servers don't need to be online 24/7 if you think about it, for office workers they just need them when they are working. For people you can just request old data on demand and spin up server once per week to send bunch of encrypted emails. We're used to that internet is instant but gov shouldn't be instant it should be slow and stable so you don't get punished, that's completly oposite from what mainstream media internet is.
It will be hard to do if AWS is 1/3 to 1/2 of the cloud space, originally people wanted to move on from AWS to Ms or even Google. They will have to develop something equivalent or equal
Wasn't there some big EU cloud project (aside from IPCEI, EUCLIDIA and the dotzen others), that was in the end used mostly by big US corp? Was it HORIZON cloud?
A bunch of smaller EU firms should merge and get half as tall as one of the trifecta. EU companies should get them the rest of the way up to their same size.
They need to look into using alternative root servers for DNS and domain registrations as well.
All hypothetical of course. Not convinced things will go that far without some more clear indicators.
The root servers are already spread over the globe. Enough of them are operated by non US orgs too to handle things initially, I suspect that the localised anycast servers located outside the US for those USA based operators would probably go on serving.
It'd be trivial to replace them anyway, and frankly we traffic would be much lower anyway since a lot of the Internet is run by us based organisations.
For domain registration on tlds not run by the us, they should continue to operate fine.
We have I-Root and K-Root in Europe, these are certainly used…
No one told the US to be careful what you wish for.
In Switzerland, Proton is well-known but their CEO is more than shady, and Infomaniak is a better alternative.
they offer so much, I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about them before.
Most of their apps have proprietary clients though, right?And they don’t seem to offer privacy features like simplelogin for email, which was the main reason why I subscribed. and additionally, one would then have to pay separately for vpnedit: they have open source clients
Not really! You can find the source code for almost everything in their github (I say almost because I haven't checked if everything is in there, but I know the clients are because I've looked them up). Besides, aside from offering extremely competitive prices, they are privacy friendly (don't offer end-to-end, but you can read their privacy policy) and use a very ethical infraestructure. I seriously recommend you check infomaniak up; I have been using them for 2 years and couldn't be happier.
Cancuck here. I've moved all my services out of the US if possible. Moved almost everything to a dedicated server at OVH BHS and a VPS at Servarica. The only service I've kept with a US company is my SMTP relay. Can't go wrong with MXroute and it's not some big company mining all your emails as they go through. Plus if I have something sensitive to send I use PGP or use my self hosted Matrix and message it to the person.
I concur. I have been using various OVH services for over 15 years, and, in spite of some amateurism that sometimes betrays its family business roots, there service is top notch, because they show dedication to solving your problems.
I sure hope so, but I have little faith tbh. Cloud providers have done a great job selling serverless solutions that are tightly coupled with the provider. Wise companies have limited themselves to the basics - load balancers, servers, maybe some serverless container solution or kubernetes. The latter can move pretty much anywhere with some, but not a whole lot, of effort. The former, have fun rediscovering the quirks of your new provider's equivalent of lambdas or whatever (or at worst, rewriting the whole thing).
Wise companies have limited themselves to the basics
"Wise" is subjective here. Using a cloud vendor's implementation can yield many times more efficiency, simplicity, stability, scalability, and agility vs rolling you own. Does it come with the cost of vendor lock-in? It absolutely can. Will that make migration to another vendor difficult? It will.
So for organizations that never embraced the cloud alternatives have had to maintain their own infrastructure or use commodity solutions, as you mentioned, to deliver their IT needs. How much more was spent using a general purpose approach with higher portability to deliver the same result vs a cloud providers proprietary version? Then include the time component.
Only time will tell.
We're looking at scaleway. They seem pretty decent so far.
In my immediate vicinity I can see a trend to insource critical infrastructure again. Not necessarily to their own servers but towards certified European data centers. Sometimes they manage to cut costs at the same time as the pricing structure for the big three is so in-transparent that they wasted a lot on unneeded resources.
I've been closing all my US based accounts recently. I was looking for a non US based Password manager service a couple of days ago. I used european-alternatives.eu and looked at a couple of options before settling on "Heylogin" it is so good I thought I had better recommend it to others.. oh and I dumped chat GPT for chat.mistral.ai a couple of weeks ago, I recommend giving it a go.
Wait, what, password manager service? Not selfhost, you entrust someone else with your passwords?
A lot of companies have managed password services. If Doug from HR gets locked out at 2AM on a Tuesday night, they can reach out to the 24/7 support instead of calling me.
It's deepseek, Gemini, mixtral or bust for me. Chatgpt is so low in my personal rankings it's upsetting
Heylogin looks pretty cool, thanks for the hint. I will definitely take a deeper look into that!
In just see no alternative to Microsofts Office tools. I think 99% of all companies in Western world rely on Microsoft office.
technically libreoffice exists, they really need to fix office comparability though
I've never had compatibility issues. Of course many people have, but a lot of the time people are blindly speculating about potential badness.
Those are moving goalposts. The LibreOffice devs do their best, but they'll always be a step behind. The correct solution is to get people to move away from closed yet ever-changing standards made by monoliths who wish to retain a monopoly.
Note that I'm not saying that's easy or even possible. Only that it's correct.
I wonder if I should sell my Microsoft stock.
Why? I highly doubt this little protest will meaningfully impact their bottom line.
That said, I always recommend diversifying. Invest in broad index funds instead of individual stocks and you'll most likely be better off long-term.
It's not a protest, it's national strategy.