Companies have this risk adversity when it comes to trusting all their infrastructure to a person that knows it all and can do it on three physical servers.
I am old enough to have set up services on bare metal servers with what was virtualization or containerization back then (vserver), but today no one wants to know how to tweak Postfix because some emails are not coming through or whatnot.
A person that knows it all and can do it all on AWS, on the other hand...
But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be directly responsible for them. That's where the problem lies, as I see it.
I don't know what managers have been reading/hearing, but for the last decade or so as a developer what I've mostly been hearing is that the only people who actually benefit from Big Data architectures are FAANG, that it's much cheaper to run on a single small self-hosted system that's done right, that the complexity of managing the cloud is even higher than a local solution.
This matches my own experience of what people needed to serve millions of users 20 years ago. If you can't handle a chat system or a simple sales system with 100k-1M customers on a server made out of one single modern mobile phone, you're either just not trying hard enough or have too many layers of abstraction between business logic and bare metal. Even for something a bit more challenging than that, you should still be thinking thousands of users on a phone and 10k-100k on a single device that's actually meant to work as a server.
This is more than a theory, it's a trend that is already underway. The cloud remains supremely capital efficient for startups, but pricing has crept up and some customers are falling off the other side of the table.
Why won't they be able to buy them from EU providers?
We (10 people) run this + CI on just a VM + storage provider, mostly VSphere from our sister team of 6 (and yes it hurts, and we have no time to move it), Hetzner and some legacy things on AWS.
Though that's currently the problem -- there is a somewhat steep minimal invest of time into this. But that's good, because this means there could be value for European cloud providers to build up this narrow stack managed and get paid for it. We will see.
I think the Heztners and their ilk are coming along nicely and probably can support a lot of Europes cloud computing needs, but they aren’t in the same league as the hyper scalars when it comes to capabilities currently. It would be great if they got there for everyone though.
The total cost of that stack is remarkably low — cheap enough to offer VMs at $0.02/hr running and $0.50/mo stopped, which undercuts most hyperscalers for bursty workloads. The "billions in investment" framing is exactly the problem. Most of what hyperscalers sell is convenience wrappers around commodity compute, and the lock-in is the product.
Wrote up the economics here if anyone's curious: https://shellbox.dev/blog/race-to-the-bottom.html