OMG just do, EU needs some balls. Upcloud, Scaleway, Hetzner, OVH are all production ready . EU business leaders are so afraid of not using the biggest provider they are blind to how you IT can absolutely run 100% on compute from these providers and opensource
It's very funny to me that all of our municipal EU customers requires that we host in EU. But they all run Microsoft online email, Entra and so on themselves.
I haven't tried to leave Gmail, but I've run email servers for 15 years and have never had trouble sending email to Gmail (get plenty of spam from them though). I often read people saying Gmail rejects mail, but I suspect such people are running mail servers on cheap VPS providers, who have bad IP reputation.
It needs the cooperation of member states to implement something like this. The EU cannot really force any large state to do anything - IIRC France broke EU rules on national debt or similar and nothing could be done.
Government agencies can pool their resources to operate a shared data center. If you take just a tax office, they are operating at scale where they have sufficient demand to operate 2-3 data centers per country in half of Europe. As for the skills, a for-profit SOE or a non-profit can deal with this as a regulated primary contractor. IT is a special case where consolidation and moving ops in-house actually makes sense at that scale. US gov does not do that likely for political reasons.
Before the concept of cloud was a thing, every company and a computer room, smaller ones were literal closets, bigger ones were large data centers, with everything in between.
There are plenty of EU domiciled Managed Service Providers who do have the skills though.
Having your government infrastructure run in country and managed by your citizens seems like a good idea just in general. It helps to develop local skills and the people living in country have a better feel for the needs of the local people.
I am an American but this just seems like a good idea even if the current geopolitical situation was better.
No it's essentially just that a bunch of hype people sold everyone on the idea "the cloud is the future" and so even government types think they have to do it to modernize even if it costs more, is less secure, and less reliable than just paying your own IT guy to do it.
On-prem is not expensive or complicated, people just make dumb choices. Any IT engineer with two years of experience can run a small on-prem data cluster.
Are you saying deploying Debian/BSD on some servers in the basement of a government building is too complicated and more expensive than paying Microsoft/AWS?
Governments aren't scale-ups/unicorns to need the scalability and global availability of cloud, they're ossified known quantity entities with predictable userbases and traffic across a very specific geographical region. On-prem is perfect for that.
> In the fire, 384 battery packs were burnt, which took down 96 government systems. Whilst this is obviously still a huge loss, 95 of these had backups - but the G-drive system (government drive), used primarily by the Ministry of Personnel Management, did not.
> [...] reports estimate that 8 years worth of data was lost, and around 17% of central government officials are impacted
Being against on-prem just because South Korean government implemented on-prem poorly with no backup best practices and lost data one time, would be like if homo sapiens stopped using fire because a guy burned down his straw hut one time.
Yes but you're saying this guy needs to build his own house and trusting him to obey the fire and safety codes, when plenty of professionals exist that specialize in following those.
>What in the world let the EU countries into this situation.
The US serpent's propaganda that played the EU into being weaker and dependent until the US no longer needs us (you are here now) with the ultimate goal of extorting as much as possible on the way out. Shame on us for falling for it
China has more people and is better organized (read: authoritarian, but competent). They can do any project they want without corralling cats. The EU needs to balance the varied local politics of their members (half of which are totally dysfunctional) and each democracy in the EU needs to balance electability with subservience to their sponsors. It's a pretty bad way to get anything done, even if the citizens wanted it, which in this case is a strong "maybe."
Because the EU "elites" are captured by the U.S. and pursue U.S. interests rather than EU ones. They work in U.S. companies, get bribes and positions from U.S. companies.
Also they speak the language of their competitor, which deludes some into thinking that U.S. interests are the same as EU ones.
During the Schröder/Chirac era it wasn't as bad. Only the UK was completely captured under Blair (perhaps the common language played a role there, too).
Snide comments like this are easy to make, but navigating the political complexity involved in this is non trivial. I’m glad they’re starting the conversation. Even doing that is an important signal.
We’re only 18months into realising and having clear evidence that the US is an untrustworthy partner and in fact actively hostile to European interests. Hopefully the process speeds up from here, now that we don’t need to pretend we can ever trust the US.
Our governments are at this weird intersection of incompetence, lobby influence and cowardice. This gets multiplied in the EU offices and various bodies.
I am not even sure what could be done to change this. We have democratic elections, people managing the country are at least formally qualified but they sit in the central Venn diagram intersection above.
One of the reasons for the technical dependence is that huge gap between the ones who understand how to architecture the country or EU information systems, and the ones who make the decision.
I mean, it would be a huge sign of incompetence if the US agencies did not use the American IT companies to spy on their foes ... and friends.
Remember that Amazon used AWS to spy on other companies when they were trying to enter new markets. How f-g naive are you to think your information is safe just because you signed a contract?
European nations see themselves first as allies of the USA. They forgot the famous quote of the former U.S. Secretary of State and war criminal Henry Kissinger : "America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests."
Realpolitik it its purest form.
The fact EU is not using homegrown providers is probably the greatest evidence of corruption. It's bizarre politicians could do this damage for so long - to national security, to domestic capability, economy and so on. Some anti-corruption bodies in Europe shamelessly take their salaries and do nothing.
It's the opposite, if anything. The US has the best conditions for running a company. It is only natural that the highest margin sectors of the day (whatever that may be) is located there. Anything else would be evidence of market distortion.
I think the Gaia-X, Cloudwatt, and similar experiences aren’t big successes so the governments may not want to waste too much money into trying to build an alternative.
I agree that Hetzner isn’t it, they struggle at the object store step apparently, so it’s quite a long road ahead for them.
From my customer point of view, I think scaleway may be the most qualified but I’m not sure they can scale and step up.
Scaleway is actually good. Last time I have tried they didn't have this huge banner that they are european, so I didn't know. Still they look like digitalocean alternative, not huge enterprise level aws alternative.
Why would anyone build that when you get curb stomped by the three US providers if you try? There's a reason EU providers don't attack that market directly.
Now, if there was a market that were prohibited from using US cloud providers that would give EU providers an actual way to move upmarket.
Previously I think that was true, but it feels to me that there really might be an opportunity to do it now. (And yes, agree that If there was a market that was explicitly prevented from using US tech then it would turbocharge that sentiment). The US has trashed its reputation so completely that if there's any latent desire to shift to EU tech the time to strike would be now.
They literally reject your emails. There is also nothing you can do if ms/google black lists you.
The only real solution for EU is to ban the operations of Google and Microsoft. China style. So that their ecosystem can breath again.
On their iPhones with Apple IDs.
It needs the cooperation of member states to implement something like this. The EU cannot really force any large state to do anything - IIRC France broke EU rules on national debt or similar and nothing could be done.
It's not like suddenly your user base(national population) could double overnight and you need such levels of scalability.
And the answer is, only a very select gov clients have the $ and the skills to do it
Skills can be hired and trained.
Having your government infrastructure run in country and managed by your citizens seems like a good idea just in general. It helps to develop local skills and the people living in country have a better feel for the needs of the local people.
I am an American but this just seems like a good idea even if the current geopolitical situation was better.
But cloud offers flexibility and economies of scale (regardless of who's running it)
On-prem is not expensive or complicated, people just make dumb choices. Any IT engineer with two years of experience can run a small on-prem data cluster.
Only for comedic effect.
Because no, they cannot. But feel free to try
Governments aren't scale-ups/unicorns to need the scalability and global availability of cloud, they're ossified known quantity entities with predictable userbases and traffic across a very specific geographical region. On-prem is perfect for that.
> In the fire, 384 battery packs were burnt, which took down 96 government systems. Whilst this is obviously still a huge loss, 95 of these had backups - but the G-drive system (government drive), used primarily by the Ministry of Personnel Management, did not.
> [...] reports estimate that 8 years worth of data was lost, and around 17% of central government officials are impacted
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/the-south-korean-gove...
Imperative to stop the data leak this month (Maj 2026).
What in the world let the EU countries into this situation.
The US serpent's propaganda that played the EU into being weaker and dependent until the US no longer needs us (you are here now) with the ultimate goal of extorting as much as possible on the way out. Shame on us for falling for it
Also they speak the language of their competitor, which deludes some into thinking that U.S. interests are the same as EU ones.
During the Schröder/Chirac era it wasn't as bad. Only the UK was completely captured under Blair (perhaps the common language played a role there, too).
We’re only 18months into realising and having clear evidence that the US is an untrustworthy partner and in fact actively hostile to European interests. Hopefully the process speeds up from here, now that we don’t need to pretend we can ever trust the US.
I am not even sure what could be done to change this. We have democratic elections, people managing the country are at least formally qualified but they sit in the central Venn diagram intersection above.
One of the reasons for the technical dependence is that huge gap between the ones who understand how to architecture the country or EU information systems, and the ones who make the decision.
Remember that Amazon used AWS to spy on other companies when they were trying to enter new markets. How f-g naive are you to think your information is safe just because you signed a contract?
I agree that Hetzner isn’t it, they struggle at the object store step apparently, so it’s quite a long road ahead for them.
From my customer point of view, I think scaleway may be the most qualified but I’m not sure they can scale and step up.
They simply can't. It would have happened by now.
Now, if there was a market that were prohibited from using US cloud providers that would give EU providers an actual way to move upmarket.