Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)
musings.martyn.berlin
musings.martyn.berlin
I would argue that these aren't even "cloud providers", they are just VPS providers. Which is fine, but it's not the same thing.
There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?
It would cost billions and billions of euros just to be "not AWS" (but worse in every way except location). Who is investing in that?
Big companies that see the opportunity to be "Not AWS"?
A VPS provider who wants to grow their marketshare?
Nation states?
Not saying it'll be a small effort, but if the US continues to wield national laws to coerce American companies to negatively affect European citizens, it's possible.
National security by ruining the market and alienating allies to the point of uniting the world against you???
Now, database replication, not having to waste time to run/maintain clusters (be it Kubernetes or Elastic stack or something else), that I believe is well worth the money to offload to someone else, but even there you can get a much cheaper deal with someone that's not one of the three big cloud providers. I will also concede that Firebase is genuinely nicer to work with than its alternatives (Supabase very much included).
Clouds give you software-definable load balancers, networking, clustering, integrated systemwide security, and a boatload of managed services like message queues, databases, AI training and inference, etc. etc.
No-one sane implements all that using a collection of VPSes, because of a simple principle of business: it's more profitable to focus investment on your core competencies, and for almost all companies, managing a non-trivial computing infrastructure is decidedly not a core competency.
I run a PowerShell script once a day at noon, and I have no idea what kind of server it's running on, where in the world that server is, how much memory it has, or any other details. I get about a CPU, a dozen MB of memory, and a tiny amount of network capacity for about 5 seconds.
This is a very different experience from "We will rent you a VPS by the month".
Sure, Scaleway still lags behind the big three cloud providers in the US. But the US providers have a lot more money and been around much longer. Scaleway is quickly expanding its feature set though. They've recently introduced managed Clickhouse and OpenSearch among other things.
Hetzner Cloud is simple to use, but it's a distinguishing feature, not a bug.
My money would be on the French.
Sure France would spend the money. We’d see none of the results.
Lidl! https://horovits.medium.com/lidl-is-taking-on-aws-the-age-of...
I'll take the cleaner approach with predictable billing offered by the EU providers. Even if it means using my brain to RTFM and edit a couple of config files (which can then be rolled into automation via images or Ansible or whatever).
Maybe it’s the best approach? Maybe it’s more profitable and European companies want to grow their business?
Europe can fail on its own, but recreating the exact billionaires are able to scam everything will make it fail faster.
It’s painful being a non-EU person working here, and hearing people wax lyrical about sovereign EU cloud without an actual product or product plan.
And once a product is anctua shipped and offered it is like already 5 years behind what US clouds are offering.
It’s embarrassing really
The offer really has moved, and people are taking it seriously.
Also: not worst in every dimension at all. For instance, you actually get serious support, no matter your size, a much better version of what premium accounts give you at AWS/GCP etc.
Are we really bringing back this debate from 10 or may be 15 years when we started? Is Digital Ocean, Linode not a cloud provider. They were the VPS provider at the time.
I think in the end I agree with one of the argument, as long as these VPS providers give you a VPS that is charged per hour or per seconds, then they are cloud. Which ultimately is a server that is easily scaled up or down and charged on a time usage basis, when VPS at the time were a fixed monthly price.
Shameless plug: We started our company[0] on this basis, i.e. managed Kubernetes on bare metal in EU DCs. We run everything on open source tooling, provide DevOps engineering time to our customers' engineering teams, take on the migration risk ourselves, and offer response-time SLAs. So yes I'm biased, but I did this because I do actually really believe in this approach.
So I'd flip it around. Perhaps building a sovereign hyperscaler is the wrong approach. I'd say we need workloads that aren't welded to any one provider in the first place. And open source tools have come a very long way since EC2 first came online.
[0] - https://lithus.eu/
I’ve heard this refrain most of my career - and believed it at one point. But the bytes themselves are heavy and hard to move.
Multiple projects I’ve worked on in my career would have had to _physically move_ the data (plane, train, semi) if they wanted to migrate - there was no reasonable way to get the data out of the datacenter over network on any reasonable timeframe.
Would you also support free movement of all the valuables in your bank vault?
Article is OK with people moving uncontrolled in/out/around Europe. Article is NOT OK with data moving uncontrolled in/out/around Europe.
It's stupid. It's quintessential luxury belief thinking.
The article supposes that there exists people that fear their data being misused but don't fear their taxes being misused on welfare for a random population of benefit seekers.
The article would have been better without the self-own "problematic baggage" language.
Just ask yourself who would be doing the misuse to see that this comparison makes no sense.
Unfortunately, it's realty hard. The US giants have offerings that no one in EU has and I am investing huge amounts of time into working around them (e.g. Windows and MacOS CI runners on Github - try to get this for free in EU). I'm fine with paying a bit for this, but even then it's a huge hassle to set it up to be able to get CI checks for my projects on Windows/MacOS. And it's not cheap either. I can afford it, but it is still very expensive.
You can’t vote in American elections, true, but you also can’t vote for the Ayatollah or Saudi Prince who controls your oil supply, the Brazilian president where your rubber comes from, or a Chinese Communist Party official who manufactures your stuff, nor do you vote for elections in other EU countries and I’d argue your EU vote is but an abstract concept of a vote.
You’ve never had control (no country fully does), and so, are you only now waking up to that fact and have been goaded out of a once peaceful slumber? If so you should probably thank Donald Trump, sadly enough. But I’d stop focusing on him when the US is by far the least of Europe’s collective concerns.
As for Europe being "asleep", who isn't? I would say the US is just as much (if not more) asleep, wondering unwittingly into a techno-dystopian future. Or look at how they have been whiplashed by China's rise (which has their own big problems too). Not to mention the more recent disastrous reputational decline on the world scene. Of course, that wouldn't happen if Americans would recognize these dangers and not imagine themselves self-importantly as singularly awake at the wheel of international politics and economics while the car is heading head-long into the proverbial ditch.
*I assume that this is what you mean by "over-indexing" – I'm not feeling like digging around for the origin and exact meaning of this phrase, which is definitely not common English.
Just to start here, the term is very common in America.
> Declaring that this phenomenon is "at the bottom of Europe's list of problems" might sound like surprising and important, but it's just plain false.
Well I can think of 3 problems right now that are much more pressing for Europe:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the broad inability of the EU to come to its aid in 2022.
China and hollowing out of European manufacturing. Germany in particular is shedding manufacturing jobs - common knowledge but happy to provide a few sources if this is a new development for you.
Migration crises and war in the Middle East that the EU is unable to address militarily or diplomatically.
Donald Trump saying a few mean words and initiating tariffs obviously start to fall in the EU problems rankings once we just start talking about the global geopolitical and strategic situation.
> As for Europe being "asleep", who isn't? I would say the US is just as much (if not more) asleep,
Both the US and China are leaving the rest of the world behind. As you noted, both have issues. The US started during the first Trump term to begin addressing posed by China’s continued economic and military challenges and continued through the Biden term via various legislation and policies, and now continues again during Trump’s 2nd term.
You seem to look at actions like arresting Maduro or attacking Iran from the perspective that such actions are harming international reputation or are the whims of, well pick whichever word you already used to describe him, but these are actions showing that the US is instead of “sleeping” actually very much awake and taking important strategic and necessary action. I can walk you through those as well if you’d like.
And therein lies the problem. As long as people are unwilling to pay for services, the winning services will always be the most predatory ones that make their money by selling their users to other companies.
TBH, EU member states can be plenty oppressive when they want to, so - why not just take it to the next level and have all-European overlords?
Clearly not everyone loves the EU but the majorities are very much in favour (and certainly this is the case among the people who actually understand politics, economics, etc.).
- Maastricht Treaty, 1992, Denmark, - European Constitution, 2005, France and Netherlands, - Lisbon Treaty, 2008, Ireland.
The votes were usually redone and passed. The exception is Norway which refused to join twice.
> Clearly not everyone loves the EU but the majorities are very much in favour (and certainly this is the case among the people who actually understand politics, economics, etc.).
This is quite the loaded statement. I've heard from people on either both sides of the argument that understood politics and economics very well (professors, lecturers, etc.)
Why is that? Which EU citizen protection is angering you? :)
My comment above was meant to provide context and to point out that both sides of the argument can be legitimate.
The comment is neutral, you shouldn't be able to infer what I think about the EU from it. It simply points out facts and says that reducing a point of view to being uninformed is too easy.
My stance on the EU is complex: it does good, it does bad, it affects each member states differently, it changes over time. Those are all pretty neutral statements too, only siths live in extremes ;-).
The EU was going to pause it indefinitely because of the border issues. UK diplomats in Brussels were actually helping with that. And the UK just went ahead with it ... That option would not be open to anyone except very large countries.
Now make of that what you want, but the EU definitely doesn't want to let people just leave, and the UK leaving is not a great illustration.
"Despite their citizens having opposed going in there." Can you point to a vote to invoke Article 50 that was not honored by the EU? Can you point to a country getting admission into the EU without a vote from their people?
Then call it "Digital Sovereignty" instead. That's what we call it in the Netherlands.
> but it’s the term the industry is using
OK, and? Sounds like it is time to push back. It's like talking about "lower" and "higher" education. Just call it practical and theoretical education instead. Much more descriptive; doesn't talk down to people we seriously need in the coming decades.
Ah yes, EU Sovereignty when a post makes it to the HN front page.
Obviously the true political point is the geopolitical security risk of depending on another country. There's some truth there but really all countries depend on all others and the way to balance it is to use and grow the trading leverage you do have, not trying to shore up your weaknesses.
_e.g._ Victor Orban could have wiretapped any communication within the EU. Supporter by an EU directive
Don't spread such bullshit FUD.
The E‑Evidence package contains multiple legal and procedural safeguards:
1. Judicial authorisation
2. Scope limits
3. Proportionality and necessity tests
4. Channels for challenge and review
5. Data-protection rules
6. Natinoal enforcements and remedies
The Regulation defines what can be optained and when. And wiretapping (i.e. content and traffic) is striclty limited to serious offences. Blanket mass surveillance is EXPLICITLY NOT POSSIBLE.
A judge is required for sensitive categories, e.g. wiretapping. And factual grounds must be provided demonstrating necessity.
The Regulation EXPLICITLY requires that orders be necessary and proportionate for criminal investigation
The member state where the service provider (or its EU representative) is established is notified when an EPO/EPO‑PR is sent, giving an additional oversight channel and the enforcing authority a role in examining objections.
The CJEU remains a backstop on top of national authorities.
I just came to Netherlands for a short visit and oh my god how much better the food is (comparing to Canada mostly).
Please, please stay sovereign.
I really don't want to know what the food is like where you came from, but it may be a WMD test or something. You should get human rights activists and lawyers working on it.
If you like Dutch food, your tastebuds might literally explode when you encounter real French or Italian cuisine lol
Travel bans, visa/mastercard, debanking, the whole nine yards.