Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers

Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/03/europe-is-looking-for-alternatives-to-us-cloud-providers/

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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Ironfist@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
They need to look into using alternative root servers for DNS and domain registrations as well.

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- Buelldozer@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Multiple countries in Europe are already working overtime to rat-fuck DNS. I’d prefer if euro-leadership remained blissfully unaware of the root DNS servers.
  
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  - xnx@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    What do u mean?
    
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- cestvrai@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  We have I-Root and K-Root in Europe, these are certainly used…
  
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Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
As should have been done already 10 years ago. When it became clear American authorities can seize any information stored on servers outside USA, by any American service provider.
And Obama claimed it was a “fair balance”.

USA has in many ways acted almost like a totalitarian regime for decades, disregarding their own laws, international laws, and especially the laws of other countries.

This became very clear when Obama stressed that illegal surveillance/monitoring wasn’t used against American citizens.
Obviously meaning that citizens of other countries have no rights, and there are no laws preventing American intelligence in any way.

As it turned out, what Obama promised wasn’t even true, and Americans stationed in for instance Iraq, were very much monitored.

With regard to information of other countries, USA has CLEARLY demonstrated, that they have no regard for decency or even laws.

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- Toribor@corndog.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Obama taking no action to dismantle the surveillance state was my biggest problem with his administration. It was so obvious how that surveillance would be abused were it ever to get in the hands of a President with authoritarian tendencies.
  
  And here we are.
  
  Now they’ve fully eroded the 4th amendment and will use that knowledge to eradicate the 1st.
  
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  - Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yes IMO that part was very disappointing. As I used to say, Obama is an excellent president for USA, but he is still American.
    Meaning there are things where we simply don’t see the same way.
    But as a Dane I can’t really complain much about it. Because we were complicit, and helped USA spy against other European countries, for which I am much ashamed.
    
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- b3an@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Wow. This guy just hates Obama lol.
  
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  - ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    What facts did they get wrong?
    
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  - Chulk@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Anyone who opposes mass surveillance should.
    
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  - Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    No I don’t, Obama was a good president and USA our allied under him.
    I hate Trump.
    But it’s alarming that a president that we consider moderate and a friend, still think these things are OK.
    
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- ubergeek@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  and Americans stationed in for instance Iraq, were very much monitored.
  
  Um… This was never a secret. Like, at all. All the phones in the phone bank I hit up in the desert there were clearly labeled “Communications on this line can and will be monitored for operational security reasons”
  
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  - Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Was it written on the phone of the people they called?
    
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seven_phone@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
No one told the US to be careful what you wish for.

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thethirdobject@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
In Switzerland, Proton is well-known but their CEO is more than shady, and Infomaniak is a better alternative.

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- iarigby@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  they offer so much, I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about them before. Most of their apps have proprietary clients though, right? And they don’t seem to offer privacy features like simplelogin for email, which was the main reason why I subscribed. and additionally, one would then have to pay separately for vpn
  
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  - cooligula@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Not really! You can find the source code for almost everything in their github (I say almost because I haven’t checked if everything is in there, but I know the clients are because I’ve looked them up). Besides, aside from offering extremely competitive prices, they are privacy friendly (don’t offer end-to-end, but you can read their privacy policy) and use a very ethical infraestructure. I seriously recommend you check infomaniak up; I have been using them for 2 years and couldn’t be happier.
    
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MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The appeal of someone else’s cloud for companies was that it was cheaper because of professionalization. But then enshitification hit and they got more expensive too. And the most sovereign cloud is your own.

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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- spark947@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
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  - Hawk@lemmynsfw.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yep. mid size business is the best place to be for engineers. You get your pick Of the lot all without HR 🙃
    
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  - ubergeek@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
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SirMaple__@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Cancuck here. I’ve moved all my services out of the US if possible. Move almost everything to dedicated server at OVH BHS and a VPS at Servarica. The only service I’ve kept with a US company is my SMTP relay. Can’t go wrong with MXroute and it’s not some big company mining all you emails as they go through. Plus if I have something sensitive to send I use PGP or use my self hosted Matrix and message it to the person.

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- thbb@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I concur. I have been using various OVH services for over 15 years, and, in spite of some amateurism that sometimes betrays its family business roots, there service is top notch, because they show dedication to solving your problems.
  
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aleq@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I sure hope so, but I have little faith tbh. Cloud providers have done a great job selling serverless solutions that are tightly coupled with the provider. Wise companies have limited themselves to the basics - load balancers, servers, maybe some serverless container solution or kubernetes. The latter can move pretty much anywhere with some, but not a whole lot, of effort. The former, have fun rediscovering the quirks of your new provider’s equivalent of lambdas or whatever (or at worst, rewriting the whole thing).

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- partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  Wise companies have limited themselves to the basics
  
  “Wise” is subjective here. Using a cloud vendor’s implementation can yield many times more efficiency, simplicity, stability, scalability, and agility vs rolling you own. Does it come with the cost of vendor lock-in? It absolutely can. Will that make migration to another vendor difficult? It will.
  
  So for organizations that never embraced the cloud alternatives have had to maintain their own infrastructure or use commodity solutions, as you mentioned, to deliver their IT needs. How much more was spent using a general purpose approach with higher portability to deliver the same result vs a cloud providers proprietary version? Then include the time component.
  
  Only time will tell.
  
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  - ubergeek@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    So for organizations that never embraced the cloud alternatives have had to maintain their own infrastructure or use commodity solutions, as you mentioned, to deliver their IT needs. How much more was spent using a general purpose approach with higher portability to deliver the same result vs a cloud providers proprietary version? Then include the time component.
    
    So far, speaking from experience, we saved loads of money DIY’ing it, even when deploying to the cloud, and we saved loads of time, in the long run.
    
    WE KNOW where the perf problem is. WE KNOW the cadence for how long a fix will take. WE KNOW the OS we’re deploying. WE KNOW the apps we’re deploying. WE KNOW how to squeak additional perf from the infrastructure, tuned to OUR NEEDS.
    
    If you hire talented workers, you save money and time, by DIYing the approach, as long as it’s done in a sane, and controlled manner.
    
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Sagan_Wept@lemmynsfw.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Lol so are we in the USA

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- Pirata@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Its good to see that Americans are just following Dear Leader into the abyss.
  
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  - Sagan_Wept@lemmynsfw.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    ? The point of searching for alternatives to USA Big Tech is to not follow some old man who doesn’t even understand it all. I see how you comment follows. Image
    
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Etterra@discuss.online ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
GOP: What if we used culture war as a way to shoot the economy in the balls?

Trump & Musk: Waaaaay ahead of ya!

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cyborganism@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’m increasingly seeing ads about Canadian cloud hosting services. I just hope companies stat to look at local solutions seriously.

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intelisense@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
We’re looking at scaleway. They seem pretty decent so far.

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- turnip@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Using what OS, Microsoft Windows I assume?
  
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  - Jaberw0cky@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Mate, Linux is so simple my 70 year old dad can use it, I’m using opensuse (German) right now, but he is on Ubuntu (British) both are solid choices that a monkey could install and use.
    
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  - intelisense@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Out code runs on Linux containers, so no Windows needed. Personally, I use OpenSuSE, but the containers use Alpine.
    
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SW42@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
In my immediate vicinity I can see a trend to insource critical infrastructure again. Not necessarily to their own servers but towards certified European data centers. Sometimes they manage to cut costs at the same time as the pricing structure for the big three is so in-transparent that they wasted a lot on unneeded resources.

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- Buelldozer@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  in-transparent
  
  As a helpful FYI the word you were looking for there was “opaque”.
  
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  - SW42@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/intransparent
    
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Jaberw0cky@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’ve been closing all my US based accounts recently. I was looking for a non US based Password manager service a couple of days ago. I used european-alternatives.eu and looked at a couple of options before settling on “Heylogin” it is so good I thought I had better recommend it to others…

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- MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Wait, what, password manager service? Not selfhost, you entrust someone else with your passwords?
  
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  - art@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    A lot of companies have managed password services. If Doug from HR gets locked out at 2AM on a Tuesday night, they can reach out to the 24/7 support instead of calling me.
    
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- OmegaLemmy@discuss.online ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It’s deepseek, Gemini, mixtral or bust for me. Chatgpt is so low in my personal rankings it’s upsetting
  
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- TheProtagonist@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Heylogin looks pretty cool, thanks for the hint. I will definitely take a deeper look into that!
  
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vane@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Maybe we go back to p2p, public key encryption and desktop apps. ipfs can store all the data in the distributed manner and gov can pay citizens for keeping data as a tax exception. But who I am to question building big corporations over and over again.

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- Aux@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  P2P has insane latency and is not applicable to most industries. It’s a decent idea for back ups though.
  
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  - vane@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I think that cloud costs are pretty much hidden under the corporate curtain. Things like water usage, energy usage for those 24/7 running servers, amount of servers that are running and not doing anything, finally the environmental impact around those big blocks of servers are pretty much not existent in the media.
    
    Torrent sharing is doing fine.
    
    Also doing same things over and over again because USA have it so Europe must have it to is not the way to go for me. I think Europe need it’s own way for technology and have all the bits to do it. I’m not saying that Europe should do the youtube in p2p manner because that’s insane but gov administration and countries beurocracy can go p2p.
    
    P2P energy cost will be way less in my opinion. The servers don’t need to be online 24/7 if you think about it, for office workers they just need them when they are working. For people you can just request old data on demand and spin up server once per week to send bunch of encrypted emails. We’re used to that internet is instant but gov shouldn’t be instant it should be slow and stable so you don’t get punished, that’s completly oposite from what mainstream media internet is.
    
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DrunkenPirate@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
In just see no alternative to Microsofts Office tools. I think 99% of all companies in Western world rely on Microsoft office.

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- ScreaminOctopus@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  technically libreoffice exists, they really need to fix office comparability though
  
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  - corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    No, they just need to enforce PDFs for things that leave an office so everyone else isn’t locked into loading and running a bloated mess just to view a read-only spreadsheet.
    
    The analogue to the printed chart isn’t an XLS6 attached to e-mail. It’s a PDF.
    
    That’s it. Done.
    
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  - orcrist@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I’ve never had compatibility issues. Of course many people have, but a lot of the time people are blindly speculating about potential badness.
    
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- shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  There is no real alternative to Excel, that’s the killer app. Anyone arguing differently hasn’t got the corporate experience to argue.
  
  Doesn’t even matter if an alternate is better, and none are, it’s about rock-solid compatibility and knowing your sheets and books will still work in 20-years.
  
  MS fucks about with OS updates, but notice that they never break Excel? (or Word or PowerPoint for that matter)
  
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  - SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Word has been broken since v.5.1a. But you’re right about Excel.
    
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  - orcrist@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Of course there are alternatives to Excel. Anyone pretending otherwise has only worked at a few places and is generalizing with great but mistaken confidence.
    
    But even if there weren’t, think about those companies living on the edge of one software breakdown. There’s a word for that: brittle. Meh, YOLO.
    
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Ledericas@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It will be hard to do if AWS is 1/3 to 1/2 of the cloud space, originally people wanted to move on from AWS to Ms or even Google. They will have to develop something equivalent or equal

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someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I wonder if I should sell my Microsoft stock.

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- sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Why? I highly doubt this little protest will meaningfully impact their bottom line.
  
  That said, I always recommend diversifying. Invest in broad index funds instead of individual stocks and you’ll most likely be better off long-term.
  
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  - someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    It’s not a protest, it’s national strategy.
    
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doodledup@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Nextcloud

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- UnsavoryMollusk@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Not really the same thing, LoadBalancer, VM, Managed service such as database, secret manager and far more are provided by the likes of Aws and GCP. Sadly the alternatives in Europe such as OVH Cloud are not really on the same level…
  
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turnip@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Europe broke their own procurement laws to use Microsoft, they have so many own goals they may as well just accept their fate.

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MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Wasn’t there some big EU cloud project (aside from IPCEI, EUCLIDIA and the like), that was in the end used mostly by big US corp? Was it HORIZON cloud?

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tacocatgoat@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
A bunch of smaller EU firms should merge and get half as tall as one of the trifecta. EU companies should get them the rest of the way up to their same size.

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