A coherent European/non-US cloud strategy
berthub.eu
berthub.eu
I still wonder how much K8S is a the right platform to deploy database software or weblogic clusters.
But people do it on a massive scale.
The author already makes it clear that replicating for example AWS is not desirable.
AWS Sagemaker is basically an app running on EC2 (for Notebooks, training, inference) and S3 for the data. And that's what needs to be set up first: EC2 and S3 (and incidentally also IAM, VPC and SQS).
Unsurprisingly those have been also the first services that AWS released.
TIL software running in Docker containers is legacy.
What cloud kool-aid are you drinking?
Politics is unfortunately more about who is talking than what is said.
It is weird that it took 'Trump' instead of Echelon, Kosovo, Snowden or NordStream just to name a few, but better late than never I guess?
The real question is what the EU will do if and when their neo-con buddies are back in the Whitehouse.
Will they finally have learned the lesson? As it stands, it seems there's still a non negligible contingent of EU administrators that would be very comfortable with things just getting back to where they were.
Most importantly, all economic development initiatives face an uphill challenge if the underlying macro conditions aren't right. The solution for the UK, the EU and Canada is simple but politically anathema: cut taxes
A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines.
The study is quite rigorous too:
https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/tax-cuts-and...
Companies patent software just to have legal ammunition to fight other companies that patent software.
# of patents in software is not a measure of innovation but of how litigious the business environment is.
> Helicopter money by supplying large amounts of funds
How about "helicopter money" for any EU cloud provider that develops tools to migrate data out of the big US providers?
After all, no matter which US cloud provider you choose, you're locked in even wrt to other US cloud providers.
So even if cutting taxes would help create the kind of innovation the EU needs, it might not be worth the cost. We need to come up with ways to encourage innovation that don't involve giving more wealth and power to those who already have the most.
Point 6 "following the Airbus model", would mean a decade(s) long funding run to create a company to compete directly with US tech supremacy. This is what was (for very unclear reasons) rejected in the section before.
There currently is zero actual competition with these US companies. EU companies each compete in very small niches (just like EU companies competed as suppliers for Boeing). Unless you create an actual competitor, there is no solution. The belief that you just need standards and many small, decentralized operators is what is making US Tech so dominant. They are dominant because you can go to these US companies and get most of what you need from a single source, this greatly reduces complexity overhead and the need for competent staff. Dealing with myriad of small service providers and their individual differences and compatibility issues is not effective, efficient or competitive.
Europe needs an actual competitor, who can actually replace US tech companies. Insisting on the fantasy of decentralization is what is making US dominance certain.
The reason most EU companies don't want to switch now is because alternatives suck even more and it cost too much time and effort.
lol
AWS or GCP is person-millenia of work, and they aren't even "a breeze" to transition between them.
So is designing and building a passenger aircraft.
I am an EU citicen but believe the EU is a lobby group with its proponents often idealists in the best or fanatics in the worst case. Both don't allow any criticism and cannot hold this mostly purely executive behemoth to account. It is fundamentally unbalanced construct that needs strong restrictions. And therefore it would also not be the best place to host anything.
Instead, this might be in my country in particular though, it tends to promote bad lawyers to serve notices to people that forgot something in their impressum and similar tiny mistakes. Usually a clear abuse of rights but being right and getting justice are two separate things and that is true for the EU as well. In the near future it will demand age vertification for online content. It just is that paternalistic.
Sure, it sucks less than the current UK, an even worse place to host. But maybe just make hosting attractive?
Meanwhile, airbus works, GSM works, so Europe is capable of doing this if it wants to. Yes, it has been asleep at the wheel since 2000 or so, but Trump is busy kicking them back awake.
Freedom of expression is protected under Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. While the EU allows limited restrictions (like hate speech, incitement to violence, etc), so do most democratic jurisdictions, including the US and UK.
The EU just wants the same data as the US except it tries to hide it because it wants to project the image that your data is safe here. But it isn't.
Regarding your argument about data protection:
- The data retention directive passed in 2006 to give unlimited access to all your data to LEOs without a court order: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
It was overturned after 8 years even though everyone knew it was illegal from day 1. Even after its repeal, some countries have decided that they would keep the data accumulated so far and/or continue collecting it anyway.
- France recently tried to ban E2E to "stop drug trafficking" and "terrorism"
- The EU has been trying to pass Chat Control, a law which would force messaging apps, email providers and social media companies to scan all your personal data with a US made AI and save all your data somewhere that Europol can access. This data could then be searched at will by LEOs without a court order. This law has been on the table for the last 3/4 years and they keep bringing it up because they want to "save the children"
On the freedom of speech:
- Denmark recently started reintroducing blasphemy laws where it is now illegal to burn a religious book. Now that this Rubicon has been crossed, who knows what will happen next.
- In many European countries it is becoming increasingly harder for journalists to do their jobs properly https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/apr/29/media-freedom-...
I don't mind when people compare the EU to the US when it comes to matters related to privacy or freedom of speech, but if we are going to do that, we need to get the facts straight and not repeat ad vitam aeternam things which are not true.
Compared to all other power blocks or countries in the world it is, though. That it's not perfect doesn't mean it does not deserve praise.
> It was overturned after 8 years
So the EU corrected their mistake.
> some countries have decided
The EU is not a federation (yet) so individual countries still abuse their sovereignty. Often, they are corrected or kept in check by the EU.
> France recently tried
tried
> The EU has been trying to pass Chat Control
has been trying
The above are examples of how the EU is actually successful rather than a failure in matters of data protection.
The key thing to understand is that the EU is not different in that it also contains people with stupid/misguided ideas and has to deal with the same challenges brought on by new technologies and geopolitical shifts. It is different in the systems and processes that prevent these from (longterm) implementation.
That is not to say that the EU is perfect and impervious from dumb shit being implemented. Vigilance for and protesting against well-intended but detrimental bullshit is still required.
No it did not. A court overturned the law yet as I explained not all countries in the EU complied with this court order to this day.
> The EU is not a federation (yet) so individual countries still abuse their sovereignty. Often, they are corrected or kept in check by the EU
If the countries were kept in check by the EU then France would not have tried to ban EtoE recently as it goes against the EU laws. If the EU as a whole was serious about data protection, the Chat Control law would have been dropped a long time ago.
> The above are examples of how the EU is actually successful rather than a failure in matters of data protection.
Tell me how successful is it when it portrays itself as a privacy minded place but it's parliament has tried to pass a law to strip literally all privacy from it's own citizens for the last 3 to 4 years? Those two things can't be right.
The EU is just the same as the US. It wants the data and is willing to sell out everyone in order to get it.
At least in the US the powers that be are not coy about it, they want the data because it is valuable. Here in the EU we prefer to sweep this stuff under the carpet and not admit that the goal is the same, just wrapped in a different package.
'a court'? You mean the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_of_Justice_of_the_Europe..., an integral part of the EU. It is trias politica in action and as stated: a correction of a mistake.
> If the countries were kept in check by the EU then France would not have tried to ban EtoE recently as it goes against the EU laws.
Nonsense. The correction happens after the infraction. The EU processes and systems cannot prevent (attempts of) infractions from happening altogether.
> If the EU as a whole was serious about data protection, the Chat Control law would have been dropped a long time ago.
It is not a law. It is a proposal. And again: people pushing for bullshit also exist in the EU. The question is to what extent the EU is resistant to that. The Chat Control law is a very typical case of well-intended but misguided "think of the children" combined with "we're old and understand fuck-all about technology".
> Tell me how successful is it when it portrays itself as a privacy minded place but it's parliament has tried to pass a law to strip literally all privacy from it's own citizens for the last 3 to 4 years? Those two things can't be right.
1. Is it an actual EU law yet? You pretend as if there is no pushback from anywhere in the EU.
2. Again, it is well-intended but misguided (Hanlon's razor applies). Politicians are confronted with digital CSAM-matters and correctly identify that that is some evil shit and that something needs to be done to combat it. You would do the same. The difference is mainly that these politicians don't properly understand what introducing backdoors to E2E encryption actually entails. Only a subset of those politicians does understand but think that combating CSAM is more important than privacy and an even smaller subset actually wants to abuse the system for data collection.
So no, the EU is not 'just the same as the US and willing to sell out everyone in order to get it'.
Right now the EU is working to circumvent encryption, it tried to implement chat control and is certainly not done here either. The hate speech excemptions are generalist, so it can be applied to anything. Aside from many ordoliberal nations, that don't have a good record here, it overall is just not attractive to establish hosting.
If you need to circumvent encryption, fine. But don't expect to ever become a digital haven. And you shouldn't, because you aren't attractive. Be attractive, it is that easy.
The US at least has the culture for it. It is on the backfoot to a degree but still ahead of the EU. Perhaps people would even vote for the EU and give it legitimacy.
Nevertheless, EU member states are irrelevant on their own. The only way to achieve large scale success is by European nations cooperating on issues like these.
The EU cloud may win only by shifting the paradigm.
Take Microsoft Office as an example.
For many years, Open Source and businesses tried to make a Microsoft Office competitor by mimicking Microsoft Office. Naturally, all clones were worse than the original and they either failed or stuck in their small niche... until Google changed the paradigm and rolled out Google Docs that had a unique feature of online collaboration.
Then was the turn of Microsoft to mimic collaboration features of Google Docs in Microsoft Office and be worse at it almost by definition.
Another example is S3.
For years, businesses tried to have POSIX-capable filesystems seamlessly scale in size and in availability. It took Amazon to roll out a simpler alternative that, by having a smaller set of features, enables so much sought properties of distributed file systems in an efficient and commercially viable way.
Back to EU clouds.
Scaleway tried replicating AWS, but they are and will always be a worse AWS than AWS itself. That Microsoft and Google could force their way through is more of a marketing win and just proves my point.
I think it is some strange way to try to push for some sort of pan-european jingoism and/or profit from it.
What Amazon did with AWS, offering access to compute, storage and other services, was a good thing, and many EU cloud providers are implementing a small subset of their core services already. It's a good thing, there are no downsides really.
What you need is CloudFront,vpc, ec2, albs, RDS, S3, ecs, and other base services and many businesses can build a lot of great things.
Any cloud has and will develop there own services as differentiators, but using common standards eases adoption.
Airbus was also not created from thin air, it was a merger of many aerospace companies.
Then again anyone building on that sort of integration is likely locked in on a provider level never mind country
Both are US companies.
Moreover, their Letter to EU Commission is written in Microsoft Word and converted to PDF using Adobe software.
For every step, they preferred US products.
Nothing surprising, the text author is a random young lady from UK, if we trust the document properties.
How pathetic (
As the past has shown, it's too easy for the printers of the 'world reserve currency' to just scoop up any emerging company with what is basically infinite monopoly money.