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Comment by whylo | Hacker News Reader

GOV.UK PaaS always ran on top of AWS (though in UK and Ireland regions), so it's always been dependent on a US company anyway

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> so it's always been dependent on a US company anyway

I'm not sure large multinational corporations belong to any specific country at this point.

One thing that became extremely clear after anti-Russian sanctions were imposed is that multinational corporations absolutely belong to specific country or set of countries.

Putting government websites and services on AWS or Azure pretty much precludes independent foreign or domestic policy. It's ok now (UK and US are pretty tight) but things/alliances change and in 20 or 30 years it could become huge problem.

> One thing that became extremely clear after anti-Russian sanctions were imposed is that multinational corporations absolutely belong to specific country or set of countries.

"Set of countries", aka economy yes, "single country" no. If every nation except the US allied with Russia over Ukraine, I'm not so sure McDonald's would have pulled out of Russia.

US can force Microsoft or Google to pull out of UK in the same way Russian government can force Gazprom to stop selling gas to Germany. Again it's unlikely in current geopolitical situation but imagine that fascists or communists come to power in US (both are non zero probability). If there is one thing that history teaches us is that alliances are unstable.

Also US can easily force McDonalds to pull out of Russia - CEO and leadership live in US and have to comply with US sanctions unless they want to pull Lavabit or spend time in jail.

If anything, they belong to the governments that offer the best tax rates and least liability. For FAANG, this often means the Ireland + Netherlands.

should be:

I'm sure specific country belongs to large multinational corporation at this point.

There, fixed it for you :)

Is there any Europe-based PaaS currently operating, that are noteworthy? Most companies seems to be US-based.

There's https://scalingo.com/ Works well.

Is OVH a PaaS?

If Managed Kubernetes counts as a PaaS, maybe? https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/public-cloud/kubernetes/

Well they have many offerings one of which is a PaaS https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-ie/web-paas/

Yandex, I guess.

You also have a variety of smaller providers hosting OpenStack, which gives you some platformy services.

If you count Russia to be European, which is debatable from both a cultural and a geographical perspective. Yandex only has one data center outside of Russia/definitely in Europe, and last I heard, they needed 600,000€ worth of diesel per day to keep it running.

Russia is definitely not European from business perspective; it’s closer to North Korea now.

Lidl (germany supermarket company) backed STACKIT?

https://www.stackit.de/en/cloud/products-services/

Memset is based in the UK. Used them a few years back, but I'm afraid we moved to AWS after a few too many reliability issues.

Scalingo https://scalingo.com is basically a french Heroku-compatible PaaS based on a reliable french IaaS (Outscale, cloud subsidiary of Dassault Systemes, the famous maker of Catia, Solidworkds, etc)

I feel the biggest PaaS offerrings in Europe are internal deployments within the enterprise!

There's Scaleway that provide managed Kubernetes and also "serverless" (containers or functions as a service, based on Knative).

Platform.sh is another (employee here). We're a French PaaS and DevOps platform. So we provide hosting, but also every bit of operations needed to provision infrastructure and true staging environments for every pull request/branch with just a `git branch`. We work with Azure, GCP, AWS for 9+ regions across the globe, many of those in Europe. This has allowed us to also provide the backend for OVHCloud's WebPaaS (https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/web-paas/) behind-the-scenes.

"Europe based": yes, we are french.

"Currently operating": yes, steadily, for seven years now.

"Noteworthy": yes, I really hope we are, at least, we have been quite newsworthy recently

"Most companies seems to be US-based": well, we have US employees and we are running on top of US based companies infrastructure, amongst others.

platform.sh

"If I sign up to your service and deploy stuff to one of your Europe-based data centers, will my data ever land on a US-based company's servers?" [______]

Edit: Apparently not! Didn't even have to sign up to the service (just loaded the landing page) and my data ended up on some US-based (Google) entity's servers (fonts.googleapis.com).

Looks like a nice platform, unfortunately doesn't seem too privacy-aware so gonna have to find something else.

It will. As long as the company does business in the us then american governmenet can force access to data hosted somewhere else. They did it in the past theyll do it again

I understand the intent of the question, but in this case a UK-based alternative would be preferable, not just a European alternative. The UK is more likely to find itself at odds with France than the U.S.

That thought reminds me of a conversation in an episode of Yes Prime Minister:

> Hacker: I sometimes wonder why we need the [nuclear] weapons.

> Sir Humphrey: Minister! You're not a unilateralist?

> Hacker: I sometimes wonder, you know.

> Sir Humphrey: Well, then, you must resign from the government!

> Hacker: Ah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not that unilateralist! Anyway, the Americans will always protect us from the Russians, won't they?

> Sir Humphrey: Russians? Who's talking about the Russians?

> Hacker: Well, the independent deterrent.

> Sir Humphrey: It's to protect us against the French!

> but in this case a UK-based alternative would be preferable

For you maybe, but not for me :) I just took advantage of the threat to ask a slightly unrelated question (although parent mentioned Ireland as well, so maybe slightly on topic at least)

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