Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

  • Existing European Cloud Options and Competitiveness

    • Many point to Hetzner, Scaleway, OVH, IONOS, Telekom Cloud and others as already-viable EU options, often 3–5x cheaper than AWS/GCP/Azure for “bread and butter” VMs, storage, databases and load balancers.
    • Strong disagreement over what counts as a “cloud provider”: some say IaaS + object storage is enough; others insist that without broad managed services (RDS‑like DBs, IAM, observability, queues, SaaS integrations) it’s just “selling lumber, not furniture” and can’t replace hyperscalers for large enterprises.
    • Several report successful migrations (e.g. RDS → self‑hosted Postgres on Hetzner/OVH, full stacks on Scaleway), but note missing conveniences and more in‑house ops.

  • Sovereignty, CLOUD Act and GDPR

    • Core concern: US CLOUD Act vs GDPR. Many argue a US‑headquartered provider can’t be truly GDPR‑compliant because it may be compelled to hand over EU data, even if stored in EU regions or “sovereign” partitions.
    • Encryption-at-rest is seen as insufficient: SaaS that processes plaintext (DBaaS, email, collaboration tools) and, more importantly, availability (the risk of unilateral shutdown or sanctions) are highlighted.
    • Some emphasize this is explicitly political and about economic and strategic leverage, not just privacy; others see it as EU power grab or “manufacturing consent.”

  • On‑prem, Multi‑cloud and Lock‑in

    • A faction argues most orgs would be better off with simple on‑prem or colo (Proxmox, bare metal) plus modest redundancy; cloud is portrayed as expensive, complex “convenience” and lock‑in.
    • Counterarguments stress lack of sysadmin talent, physical security/compliance overhead, and the real benefits of managed services and integrated identity/observability.
    • Growing interest in multi‑cloud and explicit exit plans; some boards now demand documented ability to leave US providers.

  • Office Suites and SaaS Dependence

    • Several say cloud sovereignty is moot while governments and universities are locked into Microsoft 365/Google Workspace; without replacements for Office, Exchange, Teams, etc., US dependency remains.
    • Others report smooth institutional migrations to LibreOffice/Collabora/OnlyOffice/Proton, arguing resistance is mostly social, contractual and legal (formats, mandates), not technical.

  • Economics, Talent and State Role

    • One camp claims Europe can’t build AWS‑class platforms without FAANG‑level salaries and US‑scale risk capital; they see bureaucracy, high taxes and energy prices as structural blockers.
    • Replies note that US cloud margins are huge, that many workloads don’t need “planet‑scale,” and that subsidies, public procurement (mandating EU providers for government), and regulation (eg. egress caps, open standards) could bootstrap a native ecosystem.
    • Debate over whether over‑regulation is the main problem, with counterexamples of heavily regulated non‑US countries that still achieved higher tech sovereignty.

  • AI, Hardware and Energy

    • Some argue AI data centers and GPU supply (US designs, Taiwan fabs, EU’s ASML role, high EU energy prices) are the real strategic bottleneck; others say most critical public and business systems don’t need frontier AI yet.
    • There’s a view that AI hype may crash, letting Europe buy surplus hardware later; others warn productivity and influence will follow whoever controls AI infrastructure.

  • Trust in the US and Timelines

    • Many see recent US political behavior (sanctions, threats, CLOUD Act, past surveillance) as having permanently reduced trust; even a future “normal” administration wouldn’t restore the old status quo quickly.
    • Overall sentiment: full AWS‑parity in Europe is unlikely soon, but shifting new workloads to EU providers, avoiding deep proprietary lock‑in, and using open technologies is both feasible now and increasingly urgent.