Comment by cmenge

True for the current situation, but something needs to happen before the thinking turns into acting. There's no better time than now, since most cloud services have become commodities. You don't need to be big-tech to have a competitive offering that. Naturally, the tech won't be as efficient and shiny as those of the big ones, but you have none of the corporate bloat and inefficiencies.

And don't forget about legislation. If there are new laws that set a limit to egress costs you can say goodbye to the walled garden of cloud empires.

After all, how many cloud services does the average company actually need? Most problems have been figured out by now, so such a project would be less like creating thought-leaders and more like a public infrastructure project. With exception of cutting-edge technologies, the cloud has become a commodity.

"5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your data than the other way around"

As a private citizen given the cold blood murders of US citizens by ICE, it seems EU citizens should really be worried of what such an administration is willing to do and can do to their long time allies.

What incarcerations in Germany are you referring to?

I don't actually see what's stopping European firms from figuring this out in terms of hardware infrastructure.

Buildings full of computers aren't that difficult a problem to solve compared to things like semiconductor manufacturing or energy.

Perhaps the issue is more on the software and architecture side. Getting sucked into weird cloud products that don't translate clean to other premises is perhaps the more difficult aspect of this for larger firms. I've made a very strong point to only use EC2, Route53, S3 and Azure AD. Moving between environments is a lot easier when you stick with the VM as the unit of deployment. Getting out of something like a MSSQL hyper scale instance is simply not possible without switching to a different SQL provider or accepting new operational risks.

>OpenStack by Huawei

If you mean to say that OpenStack is made by Huawei, that is not true. They are a major contributor and a platinum member of that open source project, though.

Europe doesn’t have similar offerings because they never had a chance to or need to compete Silicon Valley. Now that the cats out of the bag, offerings can simply materialize out of the really high demand for homegrown solutions, EU have a large population after all. US Tech really went off the rails in the last year or last few years, it simply cannot be trusted anymore. Even if such offerings may lag a little behind, they still look like a better proposition. EU is in a similar situation with respect to self defense, they have to step up to the plate and start building their own.

The Huawei ban in the European Union (EU) has been a gradual, uneven process, shifting from voluntary guidelines in 2020 to increasingly mandatory, country-specific, and EU-wide restrictions by 2025–2026.

Here is the timeline of Huawei's ban and restrictions in the EU and UK:

Phase 1: Initial Restrictions and Voluntary Guidelines (2019–2020) May 2019: The United States places Huawei on a trade blacklist, restricting access to key technologies (Google Android, US chips), which triggers security reviews across Europe.

January 2020: The European Commission launches its "5G Security Toolbox," encouraging EU member states to restrict or exclude "high-risk vendors" (HRV) like Huawei from critical core network infrastructure.

July 2020 (UK): The UK government announces a total ban on buying new Huawei 5G equipment after December 31, 2020, and orders the removal of all existing Huawei 5G gear by 2027.

October 2020 (Sweden): Sweden bans Huawei and ZTE from 5G networks and orders the removal of existing equipment by January 2025.

Phase 2: Implementation Hurdles (2021–2023) 2021-2022: Many EU nations slow-walk the implementation of the 5G toolbox, with only a small number of countries actively banning Huawei from core networks due to costs and dependence on its technology.

June 2023: EU officials express frustration that only one-third of EU countries have implemented restrictions on high-risk vendors.

Phase 3: Hardening Stance and National Bans (2024–2025) July 2024 (Germany): After years of delays, Germany announces an agreement with major operators to remove Huawei and ZTE critical components from 5G core networks by the end of 2026, and from access/transport networks by 2029.

August 2025 (Spain): Spain cancels a government contract with Telefonica involving Huawei equipment. November 2025 (EU-wide): The European Commission pushes for a binding, mandatory ban, threatening to make the 2020 voluntary guidelines legally required for all member states.

Phase 4: Proposed Mandatory EU-Wide Ban (2026) January 20, 2026: The European Commission unveils a new proposal aimed at forcing EU member states to remove Huawei and ZTE from their networks within three years of adoption.

January 2026: Reports indicate the EU may move to ban Huawei and ZTE from critical infrastructure, including fixed-line and fiber networks, not just 5G. Summary of Key Country Timelines

UK: New equipment banned (Dec 2020), full removal by 2027. Sweden: Full 5G ban, removal by Jan 2025. Germany: Core removal by end of 2026, RAN removal by 2029. EU (General): Proposed 3-year mandatory phase-out starting from 2026

Must say, tech that has held up for all that time, must be doing something right.

So this cloud ride, the possibility of a whole new paradigm in computing could happen before we see EU cloud centricity.

> given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany

Could you say a few more words on this - it sounds quite concerning.

> 1. Europe doesn't have comparable offerings.

I think you should pause for a moment. There are plenty of European cloud providers that allow you to run VMs in multiple points of presence across the world. Some even offer managed Kubernetes clusters.

It is true that most European cloud providers don't offer many high-level managed services such as function-as-a-service compute solutions, durable execution engines, etc. However, those are not exactly hard requirements. In fact, some cloud providers offer these services for reasons that are not in line with the customer's best interests, such as better hardware utilization and vendor lock-in.

So think about it for a second: if you can put together a Kubernetes cluster, what high-level service do you absolutely need to be able to put together a working service?

I can tell you right away: nothing.

> 2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage;

I think you need to touch grass on this one. European companies require cloud services for the same reason any other company requires cloud services. If you take the time to learn about how cloud providers such as AWS market their services, you will learn that they firmly base their offering on the exact criteria you are arguing against: compute that scales, and reliability. To argue otherwise, you must argue against how US cloud providers market themselves, which would be baffling.

> 4. If push comes to shove, the EU is critically dependent (...)

There is no "if". We are already at that point. NATO is already running military exercises without the US, and since Trump took over support for Ukraine has been driven primarily by Europe. NATO has been very vocal in how France and the UK have been the primary providers of intelligence to Ukraine.

> 5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your data than the other way around

You got to be joking. The US now demands access to your social media accounts as precondition to enter the country, and the US also outright disappears people out of the street.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo