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Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

94 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 42 minutes ago

Yes, that is why I said enterprise scale. Pricing for personal stuff is pretty terrible, although it is reasonable in some ways.

I find AWS prices to be very reasonable, but it is much different than going race to the bottom deal hunting on hetzner. That's definitely where you want to go deal hunting, but it isn't suitable for a lot of enterprise applications.

With the bigger CSPs, you really have to take care of the billing yourself to get the best value. Last year, my team was able to cut our client's cloud bill by 85% while improving service. Kind of unfair - AWS will happily take your money to do stuff incorrectly. They have business units at AWS around customer success that aims to help cut costs, but I can kind of tell they aren't a priority at the company compared to account execs. Pretty normal for this business, unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

Yep. mid size business is the best place to be for engineers. You get your pick Of the lot all without HR 🙃

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

AWS is the gold standard for product support and price at enterprise scale,

Jesus fucking christ. Do you love being screwed over in every way possible? AWS support is... bad. And their prices? Worse.

Up next is "Oracle is a really good Database server vendor, for support and price"?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 48 minutes ago* (last edited 31 minutes ago)

Let's be clear here: I would never say that about oracle.

But yeah, idk what to tell you. What cloud service vendor have you had a better experience with than AWS? Genuinely curious. Do you really like GCP? I have had some good experiences, but I feel some of their services can be a miss. If you say Azure or IBM, I won't believe you. For projects that I would consider enterprise scale, I don't take anyone else seriously.

Enterprise is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I would never use them for my smaller scale personal stuff. I would recommend something like Digital Ocean to smaller devs, but for personal projects I think self hosted is the way to go.