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At the top you're saying that no one has seriously committed to it, and at the bottom you're saying there's not an easy/quick/cheap solution.

But I think the thing you have to consider, and the thing US companies should fear, is if the Tariffs make this a case for a serious commitment. If I'm in the EU right now, I'm looking at all of my dependencies on US, and I'm wondering how many jobs I can create by investing in separating myself from these services ASAP. And given that the US is about to be crippled in their buying power of any silicon I would fully expect to be able to build out Data Centers in the very near future on the relatively cheap because the competition just got hamstrung in the market.

Additionally, you can turn up software pretty quickly and just iterate on it with a small number of developers. The problem they have to solve isn't "how do I write software?" The problem they have to solve is "how do I deploy that software." And the US just gift-wrapped them cheap DataCenters by starting a trade war with the major chip manufacturers.

> * American companies dominate payment systems.

Which ones? I can't name a single American one that "dominates". Maybe that's just my perspective but the American payment systems feel decades behind.

At least in the NL we have iDeal and through EPI (European Payments Initiative) it should become the standard in the EU https://ideal.nl/en/epi-successfully-completes-acquisition-o...

Then there's Klarna as well, which I think is pretty big in the EU.

Paypal is very strong in the german speaking regions.

Visa/Mastercard to begin with

And now you have Apple & Google Pay for people using their smartphone

You add PayPal to that and... you cover the companies that are the most widespread overall in Europe

Each country has its own set of local systems, but, overall, the most commons are americans

I was under the impression that residents in many (if not most?) EU countries generally use Visa/Mastercard debit cards for electronic physical and online payments.

There is also Maestro (owned by Mastercard), but most banks have already switched away to Visa/Mastercard.

I know iDeal because I had to implement it for a customer a few years back, but that's the first time I hear about EPI

After looking to see what it is about, I can tell you that even though I have accounts in three of the "Founding Shareholders", I never heard of it, they never pushed it to me and I only saw references to Wero in one of their app, but I had to look closely for it.

So I have doubts regarding you statement about "it should become the standard in the EU"

Yeah. Nobody seriously commits to it because fundamentally the idea of EU countries quickly moving off American tech services is as flawed as the idea of American manufacturers quickly moving to production in domestic factories:

* There's no existing infrastructure. OVH and Hetzner are great for smaller projects and businesses, but no serious enterprises and governments are using them, as far as I know. There's no real alternatives to Android, iOS and Windows. (Sorry, folks; not the year of the Linux desktop quite yet.)

* It's expensive and time-consuming. The on-prem to cloud migration took decades for most (and is still ongoing for many!); even if a viable alternative existed right now, migrating from AWS to a domestic cloud service is a 5+ year project that distracts from other initiatives.

* Compounding on the above, business leaders still largely expect this to be a one-time event, believing there's low likelihood this policy would last past 2028. You're not going to see much beyond research and planning for at least 4 years, before anyone commits to investing hundreds of millions in a massive tech migration.

* Besides all that, where do you actually move to, specifically? You can say "the EU," but given the rise of populism in the region, are you confident enough to bet $500m that there won't be a "Gexit", "Frexit" or "Swexit"? Is every country in the EU going to make their own Amazon-scale cloud provider and Windows-scale operating system? Seems unrealistic.

The most realistic outcome is that MS, Meta, and Alphabet all continue to push region-specific data residency for their cloud platforms and OS'es, so customers are more insulated against foreign policy changes... and charge European customers more for the trouble.

At least for the cloud, one could consider the Lidl cloud called STACKIT, which targets larger businesses.

Otherwise FULL ACK

But do we have concrete examples of what they actually provide and how do they compare to the three majors public cloud providers?

For example I can't tell if they have serverless offerings (particularly FaaS)

Their public facing website is very similar to OVH or Scaleway

Their Terraform provider is... not reassuring

I guess from your username that you may have more intel about them, so I'm interested!

So, I cannot tell you more either. As I am not related to Lidl, also not Aldi, despite my nickname. :-)

But I think, also the EU customers and businesses reaching for such a cloud product are also responsible to make it work. So if you are working for a bigger company, why not find a solution together with the service providers based in the EU. Otherwise we get a hen and egg problem here.

Thank you for the reply!

I don't work for a big company but work for/advise multiple companies of various sizes.

For clients already on a public cloud, there's no way they'll want to make a new migration if 80% is not just adapting Terraform code to the new provider.

For those thinking about going on a public cloud, they are still (for now) prioritizing costs and stability; they don't want to invest in a project where they'll have to bear part of the partner's R&D costs; in this case they'd rather invest in their own on-prem/private cloud setup.

I think the only thing that could really change the hen&egg problem (completely agree with you on this) is EU putting tariffs on US tech services. If the three US public clouds cost 30% more one morning, companies will start thinking about working with other partners. But then it's going to be a FFA with everyone trying to migrate to EU clouds with a very limited supply and I don't see how it could end well...

> The on-prem to cloud migration took decades for most (and is still ongoing for many!)

The real question whether any migration to cloud was really necessary, or even a cost saving in the end.

Cloud could be considered a brain drain, in a sense.

That question has been answered; cloud has been unambiguously a huge win. There are a select few companies where their business makes more sense to use on-prem rather than cloud, but those are the exception. For most, it's outsourcing a non-core business function at a fraction of the cost.

If there were a tariff-induced mass migration off AWS/GCP/Azure by enterprises, it would be to a competing cloud vendor, not back to on-prem.

> That question has been answered; cloud has been unambiguously a huge win.

Evidence for that?

Short answer: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/revenu...

Long answer: There's no movement among major businesses to move off cloud providers, only putting more stuff onto. Every "we moved our stuff back on-prem and saved tons of money!" post I see on HN is from companies with miniscule (<$10k/month) cloud spend anyway.

For transparency, I have some bias since I worked at AWS. But the biggest competitors we saw while I was there were other cloud providers, not people moving back on-prem.

> There's no existing infrastructure. OVH and Hetzner are great for smaller projects and businesses, but no serious enterprises and governments are using them

There were some French government stuff running on OVH, because some of them were knocked out by the OVH fire.

There are a lot of big businesses that run traditional data centres or their own cloud.

> t's expensive and time-consuming. The on-prem to cloud migration took decades for most (and is still ongoing for many!); even if a viable alternative existed right now, migrating from AWS to a domestic cloud service is a 5+ year project that distracts from other initiatives.

Entirely true, partly because AWS is designed for lockin! I realise there are other issues.

> Compounding on the above, business leaders still largely expect this to be a one-time event, believing there's low likelihood this policy would last past 2028. You're not going to see much beyond research and planning for at least 4 years, before anyone commits to investing hundreds of millions in a massive tech migration

I would argue governments should push for this anyway. it is a weakness to rely on foreign suppliers.

> Besides all that, where do you actually move to, specifically? You can say "the EU," but given the rise of populism in the region, are you confident enough to bet $500m that there won't be a "Gexit", "Frexit" or "Swexit"? Is every country in the EU going to make their own Amazon-scale cloud provider

The big ones probably can. The smaller ones can band together and agree to what is shared. e.g. operators can share the software that runs them, but have data centres in each country that are controlled purely locally.

> and Windows-scale operating system?

The OS does not have to be per country if it does not do things like requiring cloud services for logins or built in cloud storage, or if it has those then only those bits need to be in country (location and control).

For both the last you can cooperate with countries that you can deal with on a reasonably equal basis - pretty much anyone other than the two super powers.

> no European country has been seriously committed to it

I would argue several countries and the EU as a whole is seriously committed to it, but this commitment comes with usual European caveats: it will be slow and expensive. But it is happenning.

https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilungen/EN/202...

> American companies dominate payment systems.

I think SEPA dominates payment systems and anything else is only a layer above than can be replaced. And there are several widely used country-specific systems that are not American.

> Governments moving to sovereign services is not enough - if the US can cripple your private sector you are finished anyway.

Moving government services is a necessary first step.

> There is no easy, quick or cheap solution.

Yes.

I can say the same for Deutsche Bahn and Deutsche Post. Not everything, but quite some things are running on AWS there. Hard to believe, but reality.

> but no European country has been seriously committed to it.

TFA is about how it became a priority since January, so that's hardly surprising. Presumably now that it is a priority the commitment level will be changing.

>American companies dominate payment systems.

Well, not really

For example in Poland you have Blik which is really robust

In Poland you have Blik which is really robust...

... and yet American companies dominate payment systems in Europe. And in Poland too. Having a choice doesn't mean that the leading option is not dominating the other ones.