> Yes, the EU “cloud providers” are lagging behind but they’re catching up. Scaleway, Herzner, and others are there, and you should check them out if you’re starting a business in the EU.
I would argue that these aren't even "cloud providers", they are just VPS providers. Which is fine, but it's not the same thing.
There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?
It would cost billions and billions of euros just to be "not AWS" (but worse in every way except location). Who is investing in that?
Are we really bringing back this debate from 10 or may be 15 years when we started? Is Digital Ocean, Linode not a cloud provider. They were the VPS provider at the time.
I think in the end I agree with one of the argument, as long as these VPS providers give you a VPS that is charged per hour or per seconds, then they are cloud. Which ultimately is a server that is easily scaled up or down and charged on a time usage basis, when VPS at the time were a fixed monthly price.
You cannot possibly with a straight face claim that Scaleway is a VPS provider. Hetzner, sure, but Scaleway offers compute and database services in the same way that AWS does - just fewer.
A lot of people actually are. I am running multiple apps on EU-based clouds offers (most PaaS rather than VPS), to the tune of multiple billion queries per year.
The offer really has moved, and people are taking it seriously.
Also: not worst in every dimension at all. For instance, you actually get serious support, no matter your size, a much better version of what premium accounts give you at AWS/GCP etc.
But why would the Europeans want to copy the US "cloud" model of micro-compartmentalizing services into hundreds of abstracted products carefully designed to have circular dependencies between each other ..... And all shipped with price sheets billed in invented unit metrics and more small-print than a packet of prescription drugs that makes it completely impossible to predict how much you're going to pay.
I'll take the cleaner approach with predictable billing offered by the EU providers. Even if it means using my brain to RTFM and edit a couple of config files (which can then be rolled into automation via images or Ansible or whatever).
Big companies that see the opportunity to be "Not AWS"?
A VPS provider who wants to grow their marketshare?
Nation states?
Not saying it'll be a small effort, but if the US continues to wield national laws to coerce American companies to negatively affect European citizens, it's possible.
I disagree, "cloud" is extracting basic Linux functions into as many proprietary services as possible because businesses would rather deal with obscure YAML configurations than ever having to touch Linux-proper.
That's like saying "Cars are a marketing term for internal combustion engines."
Clouds give you software-definable load balancers, networking, clustering, integrated systemwide security, and a boatload of managed services like message queues, databases, AI training and inference, etc. etc.
No-one sane implements all that using a collection of VPSes, because of a simple principle of business: it's more profitable to focus investment on your core competencies, and for almost all companies, managing a non-trivial computing infrastructure is decidedly not a core competency.
> There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?
The French are second to everything + they strip naked the CEOs they hate (the Air France event and the series of CEOs taken hostage in the 1990ies) = They would never align themselves to build something that makes money. DailyMotion is 1/1000th what Youtube is; Mistral is 1/1000th what OpenAI is, nothing has changed in 20 years.
Sure France would spend the money. We’d see none of the results.
I feel the article is a bit roundabout, but eventually gets to the point: "Sovereignty" is not (mainly) about physical location, it's about which legal entity controls the data and whether or not that entity is subject to US jurisdiction and could be forced to disclose the data to US companies or agencies, in violation of EU law.
Which is mightily funny because in the opening paragraph the article equates "anti-free movement" with "problematic baggage". It's a problem if people can't move freely in and out of Europe, but not data -- that's our red line!
> came to Netherlands for a short visit and oh my god how much better the food is
I really don't want to know what the food is like where you came from, but it may be a WMD test or something. You should get human rights activists and lawyers working on it.
For me (as an EU citizen), sovereignty is about being independent of companies operating under law that I have no control of (can't vote in the US) and is veeery unpredictible (Trump administration). I don't want to wake up one day I find out my bill tripped because of some tax imposed on EU or completely cut off, because the president woke up in bad mood that morning. EU is very fat from perfect, but for me it is still closer to home, and I truly root for any EU company that tries to take on the US behemoths. I moved everything from GCP and AWS to Hetzner, and am moving from Github to Codeberg.
Unfortunately, it's realty hard. The US giants have offerings that no one in EU has and I am investing huge amounts of time into working around them (e.g. Windows and MacOS CI runners on Github - try to get this for free in EU). I'm fine with paying a bit for this, but even then it's a huge hassle to set it up to be able to get CI checks for my projects on Windows/MacOS. And it's not cheap either. I can afford it, but it is still very expensive.
And therein lies the problem. As long as people are unwilling to pay for services, the winning services will always be the most predatory ones that make their money by selling their users to other companies.
I’m not sure why Europeans always bring Trump in here when it comes to this topic, except perhaps he, successfully it appears, woke many of them up from the slumber of dependency on global supply chains, of course, that Americans have been talking about for quite some time.
You can’t vote in American elections, true, but you also can’t vote for the Ayatollah or Saudi Prince who controls your oil supply, the Brazilian president where your rubber comes from, or a Chinese Communist Party official who manufactures your stuff, nor do you vote for elections in other EU countries and I’d argue your EU vote is but an abstract concept of a vote.
You’ve never had control (no country fully does), and so, are you only now waking up to that fact and have been goaded out of a once peaceful slumber? If so you should probably thank Donald Trump, sadly enough. But I’d stop focusing on him when the US is by far the least of Europe’s collective concerns.
What, like electronic payments using phones running American operating systems? With the bonus that you have two new gatekeepers that can lock your citizens out (Apple and Google).
This is such a dumb topic to me - and I work closely to this issue. The blog post talks about criminal surveillance and gag order possibilities - but has no examples of these being meaningfully applied. Eu govt also spies on citizens.
Obviously the true political point is the geopolitical security risk of depending on another country. There's some truth there but really all countries depend on all others and the way to balance it is to use and grow the trading leverage you do have, not trying to shore up your weaknesses.
The EU's "E-Evidence framework" allows authorities in any member state to compel entities doing business in any part of the EU to produce and/or preserve communications data, completely by-passing cross-border barriers.
_e.g._ Victor Orban could have wiretapped any communication within the EU. Supporter by an EU directive
> Victor Orban could have wiretapped any communication within the EU. Supporter by an EU directive
Don't spread such bullshit FUD.
The E‑Evidence package contains multiple legal and procedural safeguards:
1. Judicial authorisation
2. Scope limits
3. Proportionality and necessity tests
4. Channels for challenge and review
5. Data-protection rules
6. Natinoal enforcements and remedies
Cross-border orders must be issued as European Production Order (EPO) or European Preservation Order (EPO‑PR).
The Regulation defines what can be optained and when. And wiretapping (i.e. content and traffic) is striclty limited to serious offences. Blanket mass surveillance is EXPLICITLY NOT POSSIBLE.
A judge is required for sensitive categories, e.g. wiretapping. And factual grounds must be provided demonstrating necessity.
The Regulation EXPLICITLY requires that orders be necessary and proportionate for criminal investigation
The member state where the service provider (or its EU representative) is established is notified when an EPO/EPO‑PR is sent, giving an additional oversight channel and the enforcing authority a role in examining objections.
The CJEU remains a backstop on top of national authorities.
Is it really "EU" Sovereignty? And not its member's Sovereignty?
> Yes, the EU “cloud providers” are lagging behind but they’re catching up. Scaleway, Herzner, and others are there, and you should check them out if you’re starting a business in the EU.
I would argue that these aren't even "cloud providers", they are just VPS providers. Which is fine, but it's not the same thing.
There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?
It would cost billions and billions of euros just to be "not AWS" (but worse in every way except location). Who is investing in that?
>they are just VPS providers
Are we really bringing back this debate from 10 or may be 15 years when we started? Is Digital Ocean, Linode not a cloud provider. They were the VPS provider at the time.
I think in the end I agree with one of the argument, as long as these VPS providers give you a VPS that is charged per hour or per seconds, then they are cloud. Which ultimately is a server that is easily scaled up or down and charged on a time usage basis, when VPS at the time were a fixed monthly price.
You cannot possibly with a straight face claim that Scaleway is a VPS provider. Hetzner, sure, but Scaleway offers compute and database services in the same way that AWS does - just fewer.
A lot of people actually are. I am running multiple apps on EU-based clouds offers (most PaaS rather than VPS), to the tune of multiple billion queries per year.
The offer really has moved, and people are taking it seriously.
Also: not worst in every dimension at all. For instance, you actually get serious support, no matter your size, a much better version of what premium accounts give you at AWS/GCP etc.
But why would the Europeans want to copy the US "cloud" model of micro-compartmentalizing services into hundreds of abstracted products carefully designed to have circular dependencies between each other ..... And all shipped with price sheets billed in invented unit metrics and more small-print than a packet of prescription drugs that makes it completely impossible to predict how much you're going to pay.
I'll take the cleaner approach with predictable billing offered by the EU providers. Even if it means using my brain to RTFM and edit a couple of config files (which can then be rolled into automation via images or Ansible or whatever).
> But why would the Europeans want to copy the US "cloud" model of micro-compartmentalizing services…
Maybe it’s the best approach? Maybe it’s more profitable and European companies want to grow their business?
> Who is investing in that?
Big companies that see the opportunity to be "Not AWS"?
A VPS provider who wants to grow their marketshare?
Nation states?
Not saying it'll be a small effort, but if the US continues to wield national laws to coerce American companies to negatively affect European citizens, it's possible.
No. "Cloud" is a marketing term for VPSs.
I disagree, "cloud" is extracting basic Linux functions into as many proprietary services as possible because businesses would rather deal with obscure YAML configurations than ever having to touch Linux-proper.
I would say the most added value, keeping your angle, is auto-updating Linux, and assuming/handling the security vulnerabilities updates.
That's like saying "Cars are a marketing term for internal combustion engines."
Clouds give you software-definable load balancers, networking, clustering, integrated systemwide security, and a boatload of managed services like message queues, databases, AI training and inference, etc. etc.
No-one sane implements all that using a collection of VPSes, because of a simple principle of business: it's more profitable to focus investment on your core competencies, and for almost all companies, managing a non-trivial computing infrastructure is decidedly not a core competency.
This…
It’s painful being a non-EU person working here, and hearing people wax lyrical about sovereign EU cloud without an actual product or product plan.
And once a product is anctua shipped and offered it is like already 5 years behind what US clouds are offering.
It’s embarrassing really
> There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?
Lidl! https://horovits.medium.com/lidl-is-taking-on-aws-the-age-of...
> And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?
My money would be on the French.
The French are second to everything + they strip naked the CEOs they hate (the Air France event and the series of CEOs taken hostage in the 1990ies) = They would never align themselves to build something that makes money. DailyMotion is 1/1000th what Youtube is; Mistral is 1/1000th what OpenAI is, nothing has changed in 20 years.
Sure France would spend the money. We’d see none of the results.
They did that already see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudwatt or Numergy.
I feel the article is a bit roundabout, but eventually gets to the point: "Sovereignty" is not (mainly) about physical location, it's about which legal entity controls the data and whether or not that entity is subject to US jurisdiction and could be forced to disclose the data to US companies or agencies, in violation of EU law.
Which is mightily funny because in the opening paragraph the article equates "anti-free movement" with "problematic baggage". It's a problem if people can't move freely in and out of Europe, but not data -- that's our red line!
I mean... Yes? People and data about people are two different things - as is who is doing the "movement" in the first place.
Would you also support free movement of all the valuables in your bank vault?
Sovereignty erodes with giving control to outside entities.
I just came to Netherlands for a short visit and oh my god how much better the food is (comparing to Canada mostly).
Please, please stay sovereign.
> came to Netherlands for a short visit and oh my god how much better the food is
I really don't want to know what the food is like where you came from, but it may be a WMD test or something. You should get human rights activists and lawyers working on it.
For me (as an EU citizen), sovereignty is about being independent of companies operating under law that I have no control of (can't vote in the US) and is veeery unpredictible (Trump administration). I don't want to wake up one day I find out my bill tripped because of some tax imposed on EU or completely cut off, because the president woke up in bad mood that morning. EU is very fat from perfect, but for me it is still closer to home, and I truly root for any EU company that tries to take on the US behemoths. I moved everything from GCP and AWS to Hetzner, and am moving from Github to Codeberg.
Unfortunately, it's realty hard. The US giants have offerings that no one in EU has and I am investing huge amounts of time into working around them (e.g. Windows and MacOS CI runners on Github - try to get this for free in EU). I'm fine with paying a bit for this, but even then it's a huge hassle to set it up to be able to get CI checks for my projects on Windows/MacOS. And it's not cheap either. I can afford it, but it is still very expensive.
> try to get this for free in EU
And therein lies the problem. As long as people are unwilling to pay for services, the winning services will always be the most predatory ones that make their money by selling their users to other companies.
I’m not sure why Europeans always bring Trump in here when it comes to this topic, except perhaps he, successfully it appears, woke many of them up from the slumber of dependency on global supply chains, of course, that Americans have been talking about for quite some time.
You can’t vote in American elections, true, but you also can’t vote for the Ayatollah or Saudi Prince who controls your oil supply, the Brazilian president where your rubber comes from, or a Chinese Communist Party official who manufactures your stuff, nor do you vote for elections in other EU countries and I’d argue your EU vote is but an abstract concept of a vote.
You’ve never had control (no country fully does), and so, are you only now waking up to that fact and have been goaded out of a once peaceful slumber? If so you should probably thank Donald Trump, sadly enough. But I’d stop focusing on him when the US is by far the least of Europe’s collective concerns.
> ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT
Ah yes, EU Sovereignty when a post makes it to the HN front page.
So when is France/Germany going to subsidize a local competitor, say through anchor customers like their militaries
If an EU company refuses to play ball with the US, the US can simply compel the company through sanctions, as it is trying to do with ICC judges.
Travel bans, visa/mastercard, debanking, the whole nine yards.
Visa/Mastercard are almost obsolete in most EU countries. If they disappeared there is multitude of better options than ancient cards.
What, like electronic payments using phones running American operating systems? With the bonus that you have two new gatekeepers that can lock your citizens out (Apple and Google).
For start organizations thwt are sponsored by non-SU entities should disclose their conflict of interest!
This is such a dumb topic to me - and I work closely to this issue. The blog post talks about criminal surveillance and gag order possibilities - but has no examples of these being meaningfully applied. Eu govt also spies on citizens.
Obviously the true political point is the geopolitical security risk of depending on another country. There's some truth there but really all countries depend on all others and the way to balance it is to use and grow the trading leverage you do have, not trying to shore up your weaknesses.
The EU's "E-Evidence framework" allows authorities in any member state to compel entities doing business in any part of the EU to produce and/or preserve communications data, completely by-passing cross-border barriers.
_e.g._ Victor Orban could have wiretapped any communication within the EU. Supporter by an EU directive
> Victor Orban could have wiretapped any communication within the EU. Supporter by an EU directive
Don't spread such bullshit FUD.
The E‑Evidence package contains multiple legal and procedural safeguards:
Cross-border orders must be issued as European Production Order (EPO) or European Preservation Order (EPO‑PR).The Regulation defines what can be optained and when. And wiretapping (i.e. content and traffic) is striclty limited to serious offences. Blanket mass surveillance is EXPLICITLY NOT POSSIBLE.
A judge is required for sensitive categories, e.g. wiretapping. And factual grounds must be provided demonstrating necessity.
The Regulation EXPLICITLY requires that orders be necessary and proportionate for criminal investigation
The member state where the service provider (or its EU representative) is established is notified when an EPO/EPO‑PR is sent, giving an additional oversight channel and the enforcing authority a role in examining objections.
The CJEU remains a backstop on top of national authorities.