Comment by ExoticPearTree
16 hours ago
I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire.
And without a few hundreds of billions of EUR invested _today_ there will still be at least a decade until basic infrastructure will be somewhat on par with current day hyperscalers from the US.
And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
Today, if for political reasons some EU companies will switch to whatever Europe has to offer in terms of cloud computing, they will need to spend a significant amount of money to retool their day to day pipelines and invest into developing or replacing cloud services with alternatives from the new provider or self-host if there is no native offering.
There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look.
I dislike the idea that if a cloud provider can not provide every service it's not even worth considering. Where is the problem solving. Maybe don't lock yourself into a single vendor and shop around for solutions. Apart from that the cloud offerings of companies like OVH and Scaleway are constantly expanding.
This takes time and effort, thus, lost opportunity cost. The thing that makes these providers worth it, is that it lets the business focus on their core competencies and just add-on as they scale without worrying about complexity. A business owner who hyper-optimizes for every contract is unlikely to be focusing on growing their business, even if their business is more efficient on paper.
Europe managed the first ~60 years of computing without the cloud just fine, and (as per greybeard HN-style comment) one can in fact wonder how much of the past 15 years of innovation has actually brought us for "your average org".
Also: there may be _a_ chance that the situation will improve, but as the Dutch say "Trust Arrives on Foot, but Leaves on Horseback" and your even given your "even if" the trust thrown away in the past year will take literal decades to repair.
You don't need hundreds of services. Give me virtual machines, reliable block storage, file storage and object storage, networking, dns, managed kubernetes, and it will cover the majority of workloads in Europe that run on Openshift or Openstack today.
> Give me
Companies have this risk adversity when it comes to trusting all their infrastructure to a person that knows it all and can do it on three physical servers.
I am old enough to have set up services on bare metal servers with what was virtualization or containerization back then (vserver), but today no one wants to know how to tweak Postfix because some emails are not coming through or whatnot.
> Companies have this risk adversity when it comes to trusting all their infrastructure to a person that knows it all and can do it on three physical servers.
A person that knows it all and can do it all on AWS, on the other hand...
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When we designed the (by now largely self-hosted) stack for our production enviroment, we had that discussion. And honestly, on the persistence side, most people agreed that PostgreSQL, S3 and a file system for some special services is plenty. Maybe add some async queueing as well. Add some container scheduling, the usual TLS/Edge loadbalancing, some monitoring and you have a fairly narrow stack that can run a lot of applications with different purposes and customers..
We (10 people) run this + CI on just a VM + storage provider, mostly VSphere from our sister team of 6 (and yes it hurts, and we have no time to move it), Hetzner and some legacy things on AWS.
Though that's currently the problem -- there is a somewhat steep minimal invest of time into this. But that's good, because this means there could be value for European cloud providers to build up this narrow stack managed and get paid for it. We will see.
> Give me virtual machines, reliable block storage, file storage and object storage, networking, dns, managed kubernetes, [...]
But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be directly responsible for them. That's where the problem lies, as I see it.
If those managers currently sold on The Cloud, can instead be sold on how much money they'd save not being on The Cloud, then corporate can do what it does best and change policy hard enough to give the staff whiplash.
I don't know what managers have been reading/hearing, but for the last decade or so as a developer what I've mostly been hearing is that the only people who actually benefit from Big Data architectures are FAANG, that it's much cheaper to run on a single small self-hosted system that's done right, that the complexity of managing the cloud is even higher than a local solution.
This matches my own experience of what people needed to serve millions of users 20 years ago. If you can't handle a chat system or a simple sales system with 100k-1M customers on a server made out of one single modern mobile phone, you're either just not trying hard enough or have too many layers of abstraction between business logic and bare metal. Even for something a bit more challenging than that, you should still be thinking thousands of users on a phone and 10k-100k on a single device that's actually meant to work as a server.
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> But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be directly responsible for them. That's where the problem lies, as I see it.
Why won't they be able to buy them from EU providers?
They don't want to necessarily buy it, but they want to hedge their options from "my $guy can do everything" to "on which cloud platform can I find a competent operator tomorrow".
Marketplace offers can go a long way to fill these void in official managed services.
And a replicated postgres with backups
Note that once you have virtual machines, those other things can be provided using that same virtual machine interface. Layering and standards are really useful. Spin up your own storage cluster? if you want...pay a managed service from a third party on the same cloud? whatever makes sense to you. I find it appalling that because money was so cheap, people got used to just throwing it at the hyperscalers 'rich offerings', and now we have multiple generations of people that think RDS is some magic box that would take billions in investment to replicate.
This matches my experience. I run a pay-per-use VM service (shellbox.dev) entirely on Hetzner auction servers with Firecracker microVMs. Sub-second boot, full Linux environment, SSH-only interface. The entire "cloud" layer is Firecracker + Btrfs reflinks for instant copy-on-write cloning. No managed Kubernetes, no proprietary orchestrators.
The total cost of that stack is remarkably low — cheap enough to offer VMs at $0.02/hr running and $0.50/mo stopped, which undercuts most hyperscalers for bursty workloads. The "billions in investment" framing is exactly the problem. Most of what hyperscalers sell is convenience wrappers around commodity compute, and the lock-in is the product.
Wrote up the economics here if anyone's curious: https://shellbox.dev/blog/race-to-the-bottom.html
We didn’t do it because money was cheap we did it because there are tons of benefits to not having to inventory your own compute. Everything from elastic scaling to financial engineering was improved via the hyper scalar options and it’s ridiculous to act like those options aren’t valuable post hoc because Europe doesn’t have a native one.
I think the Heztners and their ilk are coming along nicely and probably can support a lot of Europes cloud computing needs, but they aren’t in the same league as the hyper scalars when it comes to capabilities currently. It would be great if they got there for everyone though.
> There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look.
There is almost no chance for that, as lost trust does not return instantly.
In politics things work differently: you have people that "spat on each other" today and tomorrow they'll act like they are brothers and the spitting never happened.
It is a bit more than "spitting on each other" which now is between the USA and its former allies. I seriously doubt that we will just go back to normal the moment there is a US president from the Democratic party. Possibly in some areas of politics and economy, in others (real) trust is more essential.
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This isn't politicking though. This is national security. In matters of national security, you take no chances. There's no going back to the relationship the world had with the USA.
What's different this time is that the US has an extensive system of checks and balances that nearly everyone thought would make the current situation impossible, and now we are learning that they aren't nearly as effective as we thought.
No matter how reasonable the next few administrations are it is hard to see anyone else trusting the US nearly as much as they did before 2024.
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> and tomorrow they'll act like they are brothers
That's mostly how it was during the last US presidential term. The president even said that "America is back" (1)
The fact is, it didn't last. America going away was not a one-off. It happened a second time, worse. The lesson that the USA just is a country that does this from time to time. People in the rest of the world who learn that lesson will prepare for the next time.
As another US president accurately said: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice ... you can't get fooled again."
1) https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/250909...
there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer
That's true right now, yes. But things are changing rapidly, e.g. there is evroc [1], Mimer [2] and others are popping up too.
it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering
I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark, things in principle can be done much faster if you are smaller, nimbler and more focused. The solution to EUs problems is less paperwork and meetings, and more smaller bespoke companies that are laser focused on solving a specific sub-problem. Can they do it? Probably not if they try to create their Google or Microsoft.
[1] https://evroc.com/ [2] https://mimer-ai.eu/
Getting Google Docs to be a Word alternative was an order of magnitude easier than getting GCP to be an AWS competitor.
Now that AWS has two serious competitors (and some non serious ones), privately funding another one just seems impossible to me. Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?
I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of:
1. EU intervention (nasty regulations and expensive subsidies).
2. People using non-equivalent products (Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house). This part would have its upsides anyway TBH.
> I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of
Just mandate EU countries' public administration to rely exclusively on EU cloud solutions. That doesn't need to be done at once.
This would create enough of a captive market to start the homegrown industry.
> Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house
To be honest, every large enough company would benefit from doing a little bit of that.
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> Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?
Dieter Schwarz might. At least he has the money and is trying 'something' with stackit. But he probably won't see the result in 15 years.
> I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark
My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years. And if you extrapolate that to any other technology, you will find out very fast that it is very expensive to come up with a replacement solution that will actually be embraced by potential customers.
On the other hand, there is not much office work which could not have been done almost as effective in office 97.
I don't think the right explanation of MS monopoly is technical superiority, but rather the natural forces of monopoly. They are extremely hard to break with free market competition, but can definitely be broken with legislation.
I am convinced that 99% of office use can be replaced with competitors if needed, and it would work out OK.
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> My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years.
The counterpoint is that they don't need to be on par :-/ The problem is that individual procurement decision-makers are incentivised to go with the Microsoft suite, not that the alternatives aren't a good enough replacement.
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> And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire.
I worked for/with several European startups. They really didn't need nor aim for planet scale operations.
There are also quite a lot of articles about how startups (in any country) focus needlesly on large scalability when they only really have a few customers. It's exactly the same false issue here.
> They really didn't need nor aim for planet scale operations.
It depends on the market they're operating in. Planet scale operations can mean have the site load as fast as possible in every country on the planet, because this is how we make money.
Working within a smaller geography I guess you can "host" your services anywhere in Europe and be pretty snappy.
I could mention the fact that EU based startups don't dream big and this is costing them a lot of revenue from markets they don't wish to operate in because they think Europe is big enough. But we're gonna start a discussion not meant for this thread.
> There are also quite a lot of articles about how startups (in any country) focus needlesly on large scalability when they only really have a few customers. It's exactly the same false issue here.
Large companies do that as well
Offers such as Scaleway should be sufficient "feature-wise" for startups. Even if they don't have feature parity with AWS (I mean AWS is huge) it has, kubernets and serverless deployment options (functions, containers), S3 compatible object storage, managed databases, queues, llm hosted models, terraform provider.
Those should most of what startups need for deployment; at least what I've seen working with many over the last few years.
For those with pragmatic Linux Ops experience on the team, nothing will beat self-hosted on Hetzner dedicated servers, at a great price.
P.S. can't vouch for all Scaleway services, used it for a couple of VMs and hosted LLMs only. Happy to hear the experience of other users, no matter how few of those are here.
Free credits for startups are a different aspect of incentive, which is not negligible.
We've been using Scaleway's compute, RDS and S3 offerings for Ente[1]'s cloud offering for over 5 years now.
RDS backups and retrivals from cold storage[2] are both a lot slower than AWS. The "high-availablity" instances for RDS are in the same DC, so the feature is cosmetic. Ignoring these, our experience has been pretty good. Quality of support is great.
--
While linking to [2] I realised that Scaleway's own website is behind Cloudflare, which is disappointing given they have their own DDoS protection[3].
[1]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente
[2]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/glacier-cold-storage/
[3]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/ddos-protection/
The real issue with Scaleway seems to be the lack of governance. I am more familiar with Azure and features like Entra and polices seems to be missing.
How about we start creating well optimized software again that doesn't need ridiculous amounts of compute and money?
If your customers want features that require compute and money, and your competitor offers them, then you don't really have a choice if you want to stay in business.
That's up to you (and the customers) to understand that the location where the compute/data is happening is as important a criteria to consider. As it is today.
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Not everyone needs Web scale.
As proven by Huawei, ingenuity can go a great way when friendships go sour.
So is your solution that Europe only creates small companies?
If this is in reference to the parent's mention of Hauwei (200,000 employees, ~$120 billion annual revenue), then I'm not sure we all share your idea of a small company
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You have to create small companies in order to build big ones
My solution is that sustainable companies are more worthwhile to society, than late scale capitalism companies that always lay off employees when the exponential growth targets set by their C suites aren't met.
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Some people do think so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43156785
MS advantage over Google docs was exactly what US cloud providers have over everyone else: lock-in.
I mentioned MS because OOXML is now an open standard, albeit a 6000 pages one, but still open. And a similar sized competitor - Google, is still trying to deliver the same functionality.
The point I'm trying to make is that going from zero to hero, even with basically "infinite" money like Google has is very very very hard.
I’m not sure it’s necessary. Office is bloated with features that very few people use on rare occasion. A much simpler word processor would do, and the next Google Docs doesn’t need to invent a lot of this stuff from scratch.
The tricky part is how many organizations have an enormous amount of business logic programmed into excel sheets.
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My theory is that 80% of workloads on AWS/GCP/Azure are pure waste. They sell complexity-as-a-service. 80% of startups and enterprises could run on a single beefy baremetal server (or two). AWS/GCP/Azure are the result of hype bubbles and VC-funded waste culture, it's not necessary for Europe to recreate that to compete.
I once had a working program, running on a 4 GB RAM virtual server with MongoDB. Everything was fast and testing and deploying a new version took me some minutes usually. Existing users were happy as far as I could tell.
But then some corporate IT guy mandated everything had to be using managed AWS services in some three tier dev-test-production setup, despite having no prior experience with that on either side. Cost went up at least 25-fold, the development sucked, new deployments took 30? minutes minimum (because now everything has to run through some build-system I did not control and I had to manually copy keys around every time). I left the company, but I think the product exists to this day with less than 1000 customers. Nothing my 4 GB VS could handle...
> Cost went up at least 25-fold,
I would love to write an email that start with "I can reduce cost 25 times by doing thing X" (the tricky part is hiding the fact that "X" is what you were doing before.)
AWS is often unnecessary but I do hope you had some kind of pre-prod environment in your original setup
This is an uncomfortable truth on this site, because many of us work for a FAANG company or FAANG partner. If the cloud hadn't grown that much in the last decade or so, the software industry would be relatively unpretentious.
The truth no one wants to hear
Standard Hardware became so powerful over the last 10-15 years, even hightraffic sites from 2010 can be served today with one/two beefy machines.
Thank you. The AWS spaghetti is a trap of unnecessary complexity for most cases. You'd be shocked how far you can scale with a few good baremetal servers running something like Rails and Postgres.
And most (not all) of these workloads are custom software that try to fully reproduce/plumb functionalities that already mostly exist in Unix tools, with worse performance, instead of using/plugging into them.
It didn't make sense to have a Tier 1 cloud providers. EU using US tech and services was the social contract for the ally level cooperation. The moment this relationship goes towards the adversary level Tier 1 cloud and the rest of dependencies (and defense/ will be developed in house, no matter if the future administration is a Dems one. The point to take away is the change of direction in the EU as slow and as costly as that might be. Now it's a security issue.
> no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer
I guess we must be living on different planets. I have recently deployed a Django application for a client of mine on Scaleway (due to an existing partnership we preferred using them over other infrastructure). Scaleway right now (you can signup and check it out) offers:
* container registry - build an push your containers there
* ECS/Fargate equivalent - tell it to run N instances of your aforementioned container
* Managed Postgres & Redis with failover/replication
* VPC - put your managed DBs and containers there so they can talk over a private network
* S3-compatible object storage
What more do you need exactly? That's essentially all I would use from the incumbent cloud providers anyway.
> What more do you need exactly? That's essentially all I would use from the incumbent cloud providers anyway.
Pub/Sub, Dataflow, CDN, GLB to name a few. I could go on with the list of services currently used by the people that pay to push buttons.
Not to sound offensive, but others have more than a Django app that they need to run.
> I could go on with the list of services currently used by the people that pay to push buttons
I too can build an engineering playground where every ingress byte traverses as many AWS services as I can find. But if you're building a business application, how many of these do you actually need?
Once you have the basic primitives you can fill in the gaps yourself if needed. But in the list you provided, Pub/Sub, CDN and GLB is already covered actually.
I'm sure in due time other services will be covered if there's enough demand, but to claim there is no EU alternative while the basics (app server + DB + S3, aka the most difficult to scale/operate yourself) are covered is a bit misleading I think.
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I bet 90% of AWS customers could be served by something like 10% of their services.
Having to roll each of those by your lonesome is still preferable over having some asshole cut you off from the services that you pay for on a whim. And that sort of thing is definitely on the table. Trump came within a hair of starting a shooting war with Europe, that sort of thing tends to cause people to re-evaluate their relationships.
I think it depends, honestly. As a startup you could be using civo or katapult as clouds and be getting almost everything you need. I think the main issue is actually network effect; easy to hire people who know AWS, easy to explain AWS architecture to a auditor who's seen it 100x before and it's easy to explain to customers that you use AWS like them, so easy to do VPC peering, or BYOC with them if needed..
If you just want dedicated servers/VPS the choice is much wider still and plenty of providers on comparison sites and so on.
The consumers are domestic EU so you don’t really need the reach and availability of the big 3.
Availability ain't worth shit unless the compensation for missing said availability is anywhere near the business losses caused by it. "Credit on your bill" doesn't count (and you're not even likely to get that since they can just lie on their status page and pretend everything is fine).
Cloud is convenient but don't expect any kind of availability you can actually rely on. If you actually need that, you're gonna have to go multi-cloud or self-managed bare-metal at multiple providers anyway.
You go multi-region. Multi-cloud is extremely expensive, both in terms of data and functional equivalence.
Bare metal is pretty much the same story: you can host it at different providers, but scaling that and maintaining coherence between data centers is not an easy feat as it might sound.
And seriously now, no sane provider is willing to cover your losses if they go do down. On the other hand, it's not a secret this is not happening and you can take this into account in your risk management strategy.
After years and years, Amazon now has an offering to shield you from when us-east-1 goes down. Funny, no?
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It's not just geographic regions around the globe.
It is also the wide array of services -- well integrated into their primitives of security, authentication, governance, monitoring and logging, etc
Is there a EU cloud provider that provides -- even if limited to EU geography -- the equivalent of Blob Storage + Azure Data Lake Storage + Azure Data Factory or Fabric + Microsoft Foundry with native access to OpenAI and Anthropic models?
Having used both worlds: a lot of the provided features come with strong vendor lock-in, and in most cases that not, with slightly stronger “local” engineering you can reach the same targets and needs locally.
The more I work (started coding 40 years ago, and data engineering 25 years ago), the more I favor designs that are less coupled to cloud features.
If you do so, the offering in the EU just as it is now is well enough to scale.
In short: more computer science, less delegating to cloud operators, stronger designs.
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How about not limiting yourself to specific services? If you've built your product around specific cloud providers services then that is the problem not the fact that there aren't alternatives to those seevices.
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You don't need to tick all boxes from a cloud vendor.
Boring technology goes a long way.
You can get all of that in the EU via scaleway, Ionos etc. for example.
I don't know what you mean by native access to frontier models. Who has native access to these frontier models?
> And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
AJAX did so much heavy lifting here.
> I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer.
You don't need all of that. You can go a long way with the basics, and those are well covered.
I am no expert but making an office suite seems like a joke compared to getting the hardware to replicate the cloud providers, which should be imo the first priority.
Ok, so the notion that one can spin up and down resources and be billed by the time unit without having to source components and provide power and cooling and hands on is an unqualified win.
but the resulting 'hyperscaler' systems are built around lockin and loss of sovereignty. rather than bemoan the cost of replicating the US environment, wouldn't it make sense to come with a different spin? maybe one thats not so tightly integrated and siloed? isn't AWS just a mirror the the same US dominance that you're trying to avoid?
for example, despite the amount of snark thrown towards the development of open standards, wouldn't it be really quite useful is there weren't 3-4 hyperscalers with different APIs for the same basic services? couldn't we design an EC2-lite that allowed for real commoditization and competition?
ignoring that, consider the value of rethinking things a little bit so that the important part - easy and incremental access to compute are preserved and all the sleazy business practices aren't.
> And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
WTF would it need to match? It only needs to be as good as Office 97, but online.
I wonder if we can tariff digital services. EU is behind partially because US eats all investment. Protectionism is an option.
I wouldn't go this way, at least not now. But the European Commission should mandate the usage of EU based software for every public institution in the EU, at all levels. That means from the European Parliament all the way down to municipalities. So no more Windows, Office, Azure, AWS etc. in public institutions all across the EU.
And in education, please. Very important in the long term.
Yes, some of us have been sighing as companies lock themselves into aws etc.
We now have a generation of people who have no idea how to use computers, just how to operate aws.
> I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer.
But there is also no requirement for... most of their specific offering to start an online business.
Some people seem to miss this in the picture: you _can_ build without them, outside of them, and fund equivalent technology development while staying outside of them.
It's a matter of strategy and of choice.
It's also a matter of "how easy is to find people that are good with X, Y, Z" where X, Y, Z are some niche technologies or offerings compared to the more wildly used ones.
You can start a business in your laundry room if you know how to set up servers and get internet and stuff. But that's gonna be you and maybe a few "hobbyists" that might want to join on that endeavor, but the rest of developers or admins will want to stay far away from that.
Optimizing your business for how is easy is to find talent is also a matter of strategy.
I definitely hire talent that can grow the business, and grow with it.
And that means knowing your 0's and 1's better than knowing how to operate the latest trendy calculator: it's easier to understand the calculator, when you know what it's made of; harder to work your way backwards, although doable.
Yes, finding people that master PostgreSQL clustering (and SLA/RTO tradeoffs) is harder than finding AWS-certified folks, but that deeper knowledge definitely pays off: you understand the tradeoffs why, before you migrate, not after. When you know the fundamentals, you learn their implementation way faster.
The "wildly used", locked-in services are more often than not, built with/over the "niche", no-strings-attached ones.
> There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look.
I don't think it can - dependence on US digital infrastructure grew at a time where American stability was taken as ground truth.
How can an EU leader sit across the negotiating table from a country that can delete (if not read/alter) all of their data, and a willingness to exercise that access?
Even if Trumpism goes away, to know for a certainty that Americans won't do it again one election cycle seems like it will take a long time to establish.
It is not that bleak, but yeah. Current solutions leave a lot be desired especially int terms of scalability and redundancy design.
>And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
And yet they _still_ don't have a desktop client for hotkey-driven and very fast-paced workflows, meaning that any serious professional spreadsheet work is still a Microsoft monopoly. If even the US market with all its favorable conditions can't deliver a competing product after years of trying, a fragmented, brain-drained, overregulated and high-tax continent attempting the same is just hopes and dreams.
Wrong point. Nothing wrong with browser based clients. Even if they build some desktop client, by the time google (or anyone) does that compatibility Microsoft will change their formats. MS even removed their apps from ChromeOS to make it so. The issue is you can't fix MS. regulators are just too rich to care.
It is even the same as Office for Mac is not 100% compatible with office for windows (or so called CoPilot AI whatever)
I still can't write a Word document in Markdown, but I can do so using Google Docs.
The difference between us is that I know I'm within 0,1% of people that actually cases about this specific use case.
What hotkey-driven and fast-paced workflows are you referring to? I used to be an Office user, now G Docs, and I hardly miss anything. Hotkeys do exist, and more complex stuff can be automated quite well with AppsScript.
Maybe I'm not enough of a power user, but these things often sound to me like the 0.1% productivity boosts that are nice to have, but often hardly relevant in the grand scheme of things.
I've seen US citizen swich in mass to cryptpad and protondoc over ICE being in their town and then wanting to deliver grocery to their neighbors.
Proton seems to have stick. It's far less feature full than google doc but I started to receive link to proton doc outside of a immigration context.
Also, I do spreadsheet for a living and my last two job were not providing a office licence ( no need )
Theres tons of good cloud providers in the EU.
Name some. Some that match those kinds of services mentioned that people need from AWS.
If you use AWS virtual machines https://european-alternatives.eu/category/vps-virtual-privat... (some of these also do managed load balancers, managed databases)
If you use AWS for object storage: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/object-storage-pro...
If you use SES: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/transactional-emai... (but hosting your own is also a viable option)
CDNs: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cdn-content-delive...
There isn't any single provider that can match each and every AWS service. But for subsets of services there are options.
If there's a specific AWS service that you cannot get anywhere else but do absolutely need, that's vendor lock-in. Would it be fair to blame EU companies for your bad decisions?
https://european-alternatives.eu/
Based on your comment you probably aren't gonna discuss in good faith but move the goalposts each time.
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Combell is a popular choice on my country ( small - Belgium) because it's actively managed
scaleway, ionos, hechner, ovcloud.
They may not have every single thing that AWS has but you can build solid infrastructure on top of those.
online.net is quite close.
Why not just say Scaleway?
Thanks. I meant to say, but it's always been online.net for me. Can't get used to Scaleway.
> it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering
Jesus Crist and all the saints!
How bad it was before getting in par with MS then?!
If it is now as bad as MS?
People do not realize how dire the current economic situation is. Many of the large traditional businesses are on the verge of becoming unprofitable.
The monumental task of ripping out the IT systems they have built up over the last few decades, to move away from the US will actively threaten the existence of some of these companies.
People are living in a fantasy land where e.g. Germany has an enormous automotive industry which can be arbitrarily regulated and still be profitable enough to keep the German economy afloat. This is non longer the case and many EU companies are currently struggling for their existence.
> [...] but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer.
This is FUD, 1990s Micro$oft style. I guess nothing particular changed on this front.
At my company we use scaleway, and while it doesn't have yet all the products offered by AWS etc. it still has almost everything we need, and can be managed by terraform. I think it has already a nice offering, and is much closer to AWS etc. than 15 years
I mean, once you have managed SQL, managed k8s, serverless, object storage, private networks, kafka, sqs, sns, glacier, and IaC support, you can already be happy as a startup