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Comment by macmac | Hacker News Reader

This looks neat, unfortunately the dependency on AWS is a show stopper for many European companies these days.

Lots of European companies are now looking at cloud options that do not rely on US companies as part of their due diligence.

That Amazon, Google or Azure might close our cloud accounts because the U.S. President insists on it because he’s offended or being leveraged, is a high enough risk to have started risk assessments, especially in EU businesses that operate critical infrastructure.

These US companies bending the knee to an authoritarian has not gone down well across the pond.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-s-emai...

We're aiming to abstract away our AWS dependencies -- KMS, S3, SES -- specifically to accommodate other clouds or non-clouds.

There is a nice library that abstracts a few core things like secret management for the major cloud platforms and some self hosted or local options.

https://gocloud.dev/howto/secrets/

(disclaimer: I work at Zitadel) Totally understand this concern. We ran into the same issue when building Zitadel - data residency requirements in Europe are real and getting stricter. That's why we built in deployment flexibility from day one. You can self-host on any infrastructure or use our managed service in your preferred region. The goal was to avoid vendor lock-in while still keeping things developer-friendly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119777

that's fair. My apologies. Happy to remove it.

Why is that? AWS has availability zones all around the globe, and 8 across the EU.

Unfortunately AWS across the EU are still subsidiaries of an American corporation and therefore subject to the CLOUD Act, which allows US authorities to compel access to data stored by American companies anywhere in the world, including their European subsidiaries. This creates a direct conflict with GDPR's data protection requirements and EU digital sovereignty principles.

I wasn't aware either. Is GCP and Azure similarly viewed in the EU? You run out of cloud providers pretty quickly.

Definitely. In a lot of companies (especially in Germany) management is looking how they can reduce their dependency on US clouds. For example by moving to something like Scaleway, the LIDL (Schwarz digits) cloud, etc.

Getting deeper into US clouds is not something which aligns with the "goal on the horizon" of most managements.

+1 to this concern from our Very Large customers in the EU.

Today, AWS, GCP, etc. are omnipresent, so there are plenty of counterexamples; however, the growing concern is, "How do we become less reliant on AWS in the next decade?" There is no answer to that today, but this adds growing friction for any USA-based B2B vendors who implicitly say "we will increase your ties to the USA forever". This concern about hyperscalers predates recent counter-USA movements, and feels like a one-way road.

because AWS is an american company, and right now the US is hostile to the rest of the world. probably similar to how US companies view working with a Russian or Chinese company.

Never read Faust, huh?

Strong agree. Working with European gov partners lately, and the further they can run from closed source USA infrastructure, the better. There are immense amounts of resources and political capital being spent down on this, and only more to come

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