EU Eyes Ditching Microsoft Azure for France's OVHcloud
euractiv.com
euractiv.com
People might raise the point that these native tech service providers arent as mature as the american giants. But that maturity can only be acheived through healthy local consumption. Once the EU uses them, and makes it lucrative for local competition to pop up, then they will rise to the challenge. This is great
It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations - even friendly ones. It seems like something you obviously cannot allow yourself to become dependent on for a vast number of reasons.
Yes, the EU and it's member nations should invest heavily in their own domestic technical companies and capabilities.
However, I suspect part of the reason there is no present-day "FAANG" in the EU is in no small part due to their relatively anti-business/startup policies, which while well-intentioned, obviously have had a tangible impact on their tech business field.
Maybe some technical founders in the EU can chime in on some of the challenges they face when building within the EU versus the US.
That was part of "end of history" politics, that we've reached a stable democratic state nothing particularly revolutionary is going to happen, just steady prosperous growth. Once upon a time it was possible to believe that, however unlikely it seems nowadays.
Draghi's report claimed a big factor was the lack of a true financial union, which made it hard to mobilize and raise capital.
VC markets are definitely not cross-border in practice.
In the US a launch is a launch into a market in excess of 300M potential customers, in EU you have to lather-rinse-repeat 27 times
Now, the US is going in a direction that makes it increasingly risky. I think we’ll see global companies diversifying outside of the US in addition to governments.
There's no reason these things cannot succeed. Apple pulled it off with MacOS (built on BSD). It's just attention span, resources, regulations and the political will.
It's much easier to just buy Microsoft and hope for the best.
If you are big in one state in the US. You have the same lang and most likely the same regulations. In Europe its so many languages and its no more likely that we choose a company from another country in the EU vs the US.
I think that is not true for the US. So its easier to get big in the US, and then you are so big its actually likely the a company in the EU would choose you. Maybe not over another company from the same country (everything else beeing equal), but over a company from another country in the EU/Europe
the answer is very simple, raising capital. It has nothing to do with regulations, filling out paperwork in Germany is annoying but doesn't stop you, not having money or a market does.
Internal barriers of trade in the EU, the heterogenity of the countries and users and the lack of a deep financial sector across the union is what does most businesses in.
the idea that forming a tight reciprocal network of economic dependency will prevent petty politics and align everyone towards cooperation, or starving.
it seemed like a good idea but now its seeming more and more like an economic version of bismarck's pre-WW1 "balance of power" strategy.
why did that fail to prevent WW1? my guess is that its an unstable equilibrium in the short term, a prisoners dilemma where, in the short term, one party can benefit more from betrayal than from cooperation.
why do humans tend to go for the short term gain of betrayal versus the long term gain of cooperation? idk, but it seems intrinsic to us because i think the "thrown out of eden" parable is folk wisdom about this same thing
Which ones, exactly? I heard this phrase tossed around but on close examination it always turns out it something related to protecting the citizen. Which I believe, is a conscious choice on this side of the ocean.
Cost and quality. Economies of scale and comparative advantage mean you can usually buy something better for cheaper from the specialists versus NBH’ing everything.
same like US not producing their own food and equipment
Even domestically - if you interface with a big Enterprise software vendor - you're in for a massively expensive bad time. The sweet spot seems to be smaller, not-yet enterprise tech companies that focus on doing one product very well.
«The engineer wants to build a thing cheaply enough that it functions, and then cheaply as can be while maintaining function.
The MBA wants to build a thing as cheaply as can be while extracting maximum value from the process. Maintaining function is only relevant inasmuch as is necessary for marketing. Enshittification is offensive to the engineer, and is a deliberate calculated tactic for the MBA.»
We can observe this with the old-school enterprise juggernauts such as IBM. "What does IBM actually do?" is a hell of a great question today - and the answer pretty much is "whatever you pay them to do".
We also see this with our own domestic governments - where every single problem looks like a Microsoft solution - and the sales people rejoice.
Just because your software ain't throwing exceptions, doesn't mean they don't wish death on 3 generations of the developers family.
And real users, that are actually productive in their employ, aren't the ones taking surveys
I’m all for reducing reliance on big US cloud vendors, but OVH is certainly another extreme.
I assume OVH will be building a private "EU Government" cloud of sorts, which may even include new private data centers. Even if they re-use their existing cloud - the government cloud isn't likely to be all in one region etc.
I guess I'm saying, it's better to give OVH (or another major cloud provider within the EU) a chance, even if they're not on-par with AWS et al today.
They recently discovered that Terraform exists and have a usable infra as code provider now. They're starting to take multi-AZ seriously. Sometimes their network is UP and working normally, which compares favorably with us-east-1.
It's starting to look like a real cloud.
I get maintenance notices from them often that explain what they're doing and that it shouldn't be impacting, and so far they've been right.
Is your experience different?
For example, I've had endless discussions with people about the reliability of Hetzner Dedicated Servers. At the end of the day, you have to realize: You get a physical server, with fans (we had performance degradations because a cable binder degraded and parts fell into a fan and the CPU throttled), a PSU, drives (HDDs and SDDs fail differently, but both fail. SDD failure can be much more evil). It's just a little box that can run for years, or it can choose to go kapeister whenever it wants. Maybe it will take it's friends along the way too. There have been outages of servers catching on fire and frying the systems on top of them as well. Then the fire suppression goes off and shatters some drives plates on top of that. Naturally only in the archiving servers, who'd be using spinning rust in other systems this day and age?
And that's the operational technique and experience that has been hoovered up by very large PaaS offerings and hosters. You need to plan for, deal with and mitigate the situation that every server and VM hosted on a server (read: all of them) are a somewhat useful crew of saboteurs that are trying to figure out when the right failure of 3-4 systems are going to cause you a lot of overtime, stress, and maybe impact and cripple the business as well.
If you plan for this, Hetzner Cloud + Dedicated can be a great hoster, with great support and really good value for money.
If you assume that a single Hetzner Dedicated Server or Cloud VM has the same manpower behind it to give it the staggering uptime of EC2 instances, and you bet all of your company and all of your money on this VM never going down... well, you can do this on AWS. We've had a prolonged outage of an EC2 instance once in like 7 years.
But don't do this. Fix your failovers and architecture and embrace the fun of european hosters. After some grief with the early stages of the Cloud-Dedicated-VSwitch infrastructure, we're seeing great uptime with them.
https://green.spacedino.net/software-is-not-the-service/
For what it's worth, said client could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price, only that it had to be done. I've seen dozens more moves since, blindly surrendering sovereignty over their own enterprise in the process.
Best of luck with the EU in their migration journey. I'd love to help (and get me and my loved ones out of the US), but at the very least I'm eager to see more competition from a regime more friendly to (most) human rights.
what is this mean??? Are you saying US is lead by dictator???
Some people are just extrapolating and see that US is pregnant with authoritarianism.
specifically, to dis-empower you and others in your guilds ? AWS will turn on and turn off with no labor negotiations, at a known market price. Admins and devs are competition to the decision makers and an unknown entity, asking market prices or more. This is predictable and it is playing out now.
My point was, financially and logically, it made (makes) no sense. It's penny-wise and pound foolish, given how (relatively) inexpensive a VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin is nowadays compared to anyone with AWS, Azure, or GCP credentials.
You don't know, but you proved your customer's point, unwillingly.
The thing is, your logic is flawed because it's (incredibly) shortsighted.
> VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin
Those three things essentially do the same thing, yet they're completely different beasts. You have to look for people knowledgeable on that specific product, and you might not find them.
When dealing with AWS EC2 instances? A lot more people with standardized competencies.
For companies it's just great because they can hire from a much larger pool of candidates.
It's great for workers too, because they can pick my skills and go work at another company where I'll be immediately productive, meaning they'll have a much smoother onboarding process (learning the business domain rather than fighting the technology).
The main difference between cloud vs on-prem/colo/dedicated is that you need SRE/DevOps for the first, and sysadmins for the second.
What happened to the idea of just running a program on a machine?
Or Kubernetes. Everyone loves Kubernetes, why not use it?
I've never had any issues with real servers, either. Not even a hard drive failure (touch wood). I'm sure some might consider servers difficult, but [the rest of your comment]
The only US sovereign services in Azure is Azure US Government. Microsoft isn’t rolling out Azure US Government in Europe. It does offer like Azure Germany in the past which is sovereign.
There typically is a delay in rollout of features from US to Europe though.
But you could make the same nationalist argument for their dependence on all sorts of things like Microsoft Office. They could go to LibreOffice which some places have but it doesn’t have parity with Microsoft Office
Another argument could be made that Europe shouldn’t rely on places like Dell either for corporate or business PCs such as how in many sectors years ago the US stopped using Lenovo.
Microsoft is still subject to US laws like the CLOUD Act. That’s the real issue policymakers are reacting to. They’re not necessarily anti-Azure; they’re pro-control over sensitive systems
If Europe wants full-stack control, they’ll need to build it
Microsoft isn't much better : https://www.geekwire.com/2018/microsoft-releases-details-las...
I remember losing access to azure devops, even though it was hosted in Canada, because Microsoft didn't have a backup domain controller elsewhere than in their datacenter in Texas.
I'm sure OVH learned from this event and will use EU's investment to improve everything.
You might want to contrast with Azure's recent security record. Microsoft is letting it seriously slide
That being said, I'm all for the EU using EU products, and hopefully it only means OVH gets better over time.
When this administration has messaged [3] and made trade policy [4], it has used that goods-only view of trade, i.e. it ignores services.
Microsoft exporting Azure as a service has zero impact on how many goods America buys or sells. (If anything, it might increase the goods deficit if the servers Azure runs on, or the buildings its staff occupy, use any foreign components.) So by this administration’s accounting, the EU reducing its purchases of Azure is great if they e.g. buy two more Hershey’s bars. That’s economically nonsense, and that is the problem.
[And thank you! :)]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_trade
[2] https://www.bea.gov/news/2025/us-international-trade-goods-a...
[3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...
[4] https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reciprocal-tariff-chart-20545...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/trump-tar...
[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/05/fact-sheet-pr...
― Voltaire
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7390459-lord-protect-me-fro...
Without memory or storage chips from Asian manufacturers what servers can one deploy? I think Micron is the last (?) major US-headquartered maker of these types of chips.
> What client devices can the EU buy?
Who makes the screens for client devices (phones, tablets, laptops, etc)? How many are American companies?
ARM? Something that is increasingly commonplace as a machine type in AWS and GCP
All of this to me says the world needs far more diverse supply chains either a healthy level of alternatives at every stage.
The IT of the ICJ on MS 365 got shut off... After a truth social post.
EU law means nothing when the employees are on the next plain to Washington. And when the funding and expertise and infrastructure is tightly controlled by USA entities, who'm react severely to the posts of the commander in Chief. (As would I)
The ICJ email issue was tied to a support contract suspension.
If the EU wants full independence, that’s a fair goal, but we should be clear about what's actually happened versus what feels like it could happen.
It's not what the EU wants at all. That assumption is the root of your arguments, but it is wrong.
The EU wasn't created to shaft America or anyone else.
In fact, the reason so many US services and companies were doing business in the EU was because the USA had a stellar reputation as an ally and as a society.
But at this point, after the ICJ, Greenland annexation, weapon kill switches, White house office ambushes, hostile tarrifs, and all the other drama and threats and coercion, arrests of EU citizens etc.. it's a theme that the EU no longer can trust nor rely on the US. The US only cares for itself, not any friends and allies.
Put simply: The USA wouldn't host it's federal websites on Alibaba Cloud. And the US isn't a trusted reliable friend and ally anymore, as regrettable as that is, it means a pivot away from relying on anything US is necessary. And common sense. To anyone not drinking the cool aid. ;)
The reality is that the EU has had plans for strategic autonomy in case of necessity, for a longer time. But hasn't enacted them because the US was a trusted partner. And this has been the balance of things since the 2nd world war, so roughly 85 years.
The reality now is upside down: In most of the EU the US now has a reputation on par with Russia and China, and the theme is to enact strategic autonomy as soon as possible.
This is a tipping point, because up until now the US enjoyed the position of uncontested dominance, backed by a multiplier equal it's economic weight and global influence etc.. This is no longer self-evident, because of reasons, but at the end of the day this is due to decisions Americans made and which their children will also have to live with.
I genuinely wonder if this isn't the decade in which the US shot itself in the head and crippled itself for the next 85 years. For basically no reason, other than self-interested and self-enriching politics.
It's literally incredible how much hard work and effort was thrown out in the span of two years, which took hundreds of years to accumulate. And I don't think the second time roud will be any easier or quicker.
Even so, two of the major hurdles we see companies facing are:
1. Skills/Training/Hiring – Converting a staff of engineers familiar with AWS/Azure/etc to a new provider isn't necessarily straightforward.
2. Migration & disruption – Untangling one's integration with AWS/Azure/etc, finding and testing replacement services, planning the migration, executing on the migration. All this can cause disruption and delays in actually working on what's important.
What we do is provide multi-AZ bare-metal Kubernetes deployments onto EU providers (we default to Hetzner, but are flexible, and can do on-prem). As part of this we: a) include monthly DevOps engineering time dedicated to each client, and b) handle the migration planning and execution.
We're really trying to help companies (particularly SMEs & startups) make the jump. We try to mitigate the skills issue by providing actual engineers integrated with your team. We try to minimise the disruption by handling the migration in parallel to ongoing development cycles/sprints.
If anyone wants to know more you can reach me at adam@ domain. I hope this was interesting and not too much of a pitch.
[1]: https://lithus.eu
That at least the card they're paying with is not stolen (the real owner would start a dispute).
And if you only ask for this after denying a fiat payment, then the fraction of those clients who also have cryptocurrency is near zero so it's not worth doing. Corporations won't buy crypto to buy their servers with, because they consider it a high risk.
And you still have to give back the crypto if a court finds it was stolen.
I wanted to use their object storage and some on demand compute, so that was a complete blocker.
As a US citizen, I'd like to thank any of you imposing costs on us for how intellectually lazy & stupid we've gotten en masse. Reality intruding over and over and over is the only way things start getting better.
One political change put millions of people and businesses at risk. Minimising this in future is not putting everything on someone else's computers.
Having some on-prem compute and some cloud compute is entirely viable.
Might just have been bad luck, but personally, I can't recommend OVH. I'd go with Hetzner any day of the week.
While I love and regularly use Hetzner’s cloud and dedicated servers for many things, it’s unfortunately not yet on the same scale as OVH in terms of product offering. But I hope that changes over time.
I'm curious, though: Do you have monitoring set up for your OVH machine? Because I've noticed that very often, disruption may just be short and not necessarily noticeable unless you happen to use the service at the time. But for something critical (or a website for your business), this is still a problem.
One of the services I used was Migadu. I migrated away from them after three months because they were just constantly unavailable for short periods of time. It was really annoying. Looking at their status page, you can see disruptions quite often. Of course, I can't say whether that's OVH's fault, or Migadu's, or a mix of both:
Edit: The other service I used was masto.host. Just checked his social media account, and the last incident was two months ago: https://mastodon.social/@mastohost/114350904325778343 - If you scroll down on his profile, you'll see more posts like this, quite frequently.
They provide some DDOS protection and also I remember when there was a fire at a datacenter/downtime they refunded me for the down time that was nice
My stuff is basic though personal sites either Apache/PHP or NGINX/NodeJS
I love the payments simplicity and transparency.
It's one of the biggest hosting companies in the world (probably the biggest in Europe) but it doesn't have exactly the best reputation.
What happened to organisations being the sovereign entities not national tied clouds?
(I'm not referring to Euractiv but to whoever the sourve is).
They have nothing to gain and only gave a heads-up to Microsoft.
Does OVH have intune-like service? Cloud DBs? Office 365 runs on Azure.