Migrating from AWS to a European Cloud – How We Cut Costs by 62%

I work for a consultancy company that helps other companies set up cloud infrastructure and secure it. We have a lot of customers on a lot of different platforms, from all-in on AWS, Azure and GCP to smaller local cloud providers, and it's interesting to see the market evolve.

It's true that using some of the smaller cloud providers can save you about half, but you might need an experienced engineer to come up with solutions and an extra machine here and there to ensure availability, so the one-on-one cost is not that clear-cut. Lots of smaller companies go all in on e.g. AWS, but then their eggs are locked into one expensive basket, especially if you build your product on AWS-specific services that can't be moved easily elsewhere.

Our biggest concern is a reliable replacement for RDS-postgres, which we've been using for about 13 years now and has been rock solid with the exception of a single, short period. Even then it was an update that caused high baseline CPU usage and AWS had it fixed in a few days.

Cost isn't the primary concern - though lower costs would be a nice side effect.

Shopping list:

- Good OpenTofu (or Terraform) support

- Reliable

- Good managed database (we could roll our own here if needed, I just don't wanna).

- Canadian DC

Nothing we do requires high performance or anything vendor specific. We also roll our own o11y and don't use AWS's vendor-specific solutions (at least not primarily).

My only complaint is that one day, they had an electrical problem on their datacenter and we were down for an entire day. We lost dozens of clients that day.

But this was 6 years ago, so a lot must have changed since then. And yes, I know we should have had a plan for when such things happen, but we didn't have one. Nowadays we have a different architecture with more than one cloud provider for redundancy, and it's cheaper than having everything on AWS.

But they are the next economic recession waiting for Europe. It's my understanding that there is no legal basis any longer to transfer personally identifiable data to AWS servers. With the cooling of relations between USA and Europe, and the budding trade war, it's just a matter of time before cloud services become the next weapon. And huge European enterprises depend on American cloud businesses in hyper-critical ways.

Just ensure that you have backup plans for your backup. OVH had a fire (shit happens), but then actually lost data. I don't think that has ever happened at AWS.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-ordered-...

Look what happens to one of OVHs datacenters, with wood ceilings and floors … completely destroyed some companies because their backups were also there.

When you search for it, you will see how negligently they managed this datacenter.

Maybe their professional offerings are better. Never made me want to try though...

So this has nothing to do with USA regime having access to data stored with USA companies. It’s just cost.

I recently discovered that Scaleway is also European, and that their offering is on par with many managed services AWS provides which could be a good drop-in replacement for them.