But how to get to that European cloud?

The issue is not lack of european providers. The issue is almost natural lobby from the likes of Microsoft and Amazon.<p>All the unis are infected with former corpo programmers who push their preferred employer stacks. Students get free credits to use on Azure. Some of them become gov employees or consultants. You end up with all sides agreeing Microsoft Azure is the most trustworthy solution.<p>Everything gov in my country seems to be built with asp.net to point where its often requirement in the contract.<p>Lets start with erasing all the proprietary tech taught at universities. Microsoft can do their education. Universities dont have to do it for them for free.

I didn’t see any mention of EU’s last attempt to build a sovereign cloud: Gaia-X. I think that didn’t really go anywhere due to disagreements over technical direction. Much like Quaero.<p>Don’t get me wrong, I hope it goes better this time and the author acknowledges the many pitfalls of such a complex undertaking.<p>Edit: The author previously discussed Gaia-X at length here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;berthub.eu&#x2F;articles&#x2F;posts&#x2F;gaia-x-is-an-expensive-distraction" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;berthub.eu&#x2F;articles&#x2F;posts&#x2F;gaia-x-is-an-expensive-dis...</a>

I don&#x27;t think bureaucrats can build a successful cloud by enforcing laws, adding even more regulations, making policies and using subsidies.<p>This is not how the market likes to work. There has to be a demand and the free market forces will build a supply. Governments can help by reducing regulation and bureaucracy, reducing taxes.

The elephant in the room here is pay. You can’t expect people to bend over backwards for 70k&#x2F;yr.<p>Start paying 2-300k in Europe and watch shit being built.

Is OVH not a European cloud provider? There are also smaller players like Hetzner.

China was able to build its own IT technologies thanks to decades of protectionism and smart maneuvers from the party. Europe, being under the US &quot;umbrella&quot;, was in an almost impossible position to do so, along with the very poor attitude of European elites, which is one of rent-seeking rather than investment.<p>Regardless of the attitude, I don&#x27;t see this happening without some form of protectionism, trump sperging out might be the chance of a century to reboot the European military and IT industries.

If Europe wants cloud protectionism then they need apply the usual methods: tariffs on foreign cloud services and requirements on public funds to be spent on the European cloud providers.<p>They could apply Chinese policy and require foreign cloud corporations to have locally owned partners that will own the technology produced locally.

Think further: we need a European DARPA.

Please can Australia join these initiatives. We have the same issues but are too small to do it ourselves.

Cloud is highly overrated for a lot of projects. While in theory you could scale up or down based on demand, my experience the need for it was rare. More common was provisioned resources sitting there for months. And S3 encourages you to basically save everything<p>And there was another aspect, since compute &#x2F; storage was a consumable. Devops were less shy about spinning up services as if they were candy, rather than being more economical with resources that were fixed in the short term.

I think the big problem is this: That NLNet thing he mentions gives subsidies of the insanely large amount of €5-50k that’s not even worth getting out of bed over, much less quitting your job on the off chance you are successful in the 3 months that gives you.

This will be harder-when AWS (and the others follow) launch the EU sovereign cloud[0]<p>Word is that it&#x27;ll be run similar to the top secret (lol) cloud [1] that they run for the USA 3 letter agencies.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;compliance&#x2F;europe-digital-sovereignty&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;compliance&#x2F;europe-digital-sovereignty...</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;federal&#x2F;top-secret-cloud&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;federal&#x2F;top-secret-cloud&#x2F;</a>

I am really questioning that initial premise that &quot;we need an European cloud&quot;. Here I roughly understand &quot;we need a few big European hyperscaler with a dozen huge datacenters we can migrate to&quot; because this is the model we understand. But you are fundamentally &quot;fighting the last battle&quot;, the wrong battle.<p>The idea of an European cloud has happened several time before and I was once strongly encouraged to select one so I investigated, here are my findings:<p>About 10 years ago all those countries needed a cloud to put their government and sensitive industries on, so public money and contracts was given to friendly corporations. Once the initial chunk of free money ran out a lot of those companies got rid of the business. In France a lot got sold to Orange, the big telco partially owned by the state.<p>I considered it because according to some metrics they had the biggest cloud in Europe.<p>I found out quickly they actually immediately given everything to Huawei. So it was all managed by Huawei but if I remember correctly still hosted on Orange premises.<p>Strangely information about it is more difficult to find now but you can still read about it on third party websites [0].<p>By the way all of this is GDPR whatever compliant.<p>I just did a quick search and it seems they had to shut it down in 2024 because Huawei became such a radioactive topic. Information is hard to find about it in English.<p>In the end the companies who were forced to select a &quot;sovereign cloud&quot; probably went through hell and moved around several time in the last 10 years. You are told you should&#x2F;must go on a sovereign cloud, you then end up on a Chinese cloud and you are then kicked out of it.<p>I am not pushing for the big american hyperscalers but be very careful before listening to politicians.<p>- [0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techmonitor.ai&#x2F;hardware&#x2F;cloud&#x2F;orange-introduces-public-cloud-service-with-huawei" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techmonitor.ai&#x2F;hardware&#x2F;cloud&#x2F;orange-introduces-...</a>

The cloud is an anti-sovereign concept. Maybe Europe doesn&#x27;t need other people&#x27;s computers, but their own computers instead.

I’m dreaming of a set of individual providers, all building with similar dev experience, auth, billing functions, quality of service etc.<p>I own <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mailpace.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mailpace.com</a> and would love to expand from there- reach out if you want to help.

I&#x27;ve done quite a bit of government contracting for governments in Europe, including various government levels in Belgium and the EU itself. Every single time, I encountered a lot of friction regarding hosting. The applications were always hosted by a partner [1] that won a large public tender, usually by virtue of supposedly being the cheapest. Those hosting partners were invariably awful and incompetent. Simple tasks would take weeks. Complex tasks wouldn&#x27;t happen at all. There was enough red tape to go to the moon and back.<p>Every project I worked on, developers (consultants like me) advocated for finding a way of bypassing the hosting partner, and either doing their thing on top of platforms like Hetzner, or switching to AWS&#x2F;Azure. Not because they particularly love AWS, but because the default hosting solution sucks so much arse.<p>I can totally see EU cloud infrastructure working for the public sector, but ONLY if they come with the same level of self-service management as the big cloud providers. Without that, it&#x27;s a non-starter.<p>[1] One of those is a large French company on the verge of banruptcy.

You also have Outscale (outscale.com), they are French, located near Paris. They are owned by Dassault Systèmes, a big French company.

There are large European data centers run by European telecoms, including Telia and Altice. So there&#x27;s something to scale up from.

Cloud is easy nowadays.<p>There is everything:<p>Servers&#x2F;Storage&#x2F;Network&#x2F;Linux&#x2F;Kubernetes<p>Experts are still rare but people can learn.

Hmm one other thing - USA is completely English but EU is quite multi-lingual so to be competitive within EU market services need a lot of more efforts.

Do onerous EU regulations have to do with the inability to produce a competitive cloud locally?

&gt; The European cloud industry has struggled to take off, partly because existing players lacked the will or vision to compete effectively (among many other reasons).<p>The EU would have come after them. It is coming after Google, AWS and Azure even though they have diplomatic support from the US proper; how is an EU cloud provider supposed to compete?<p>The people with the will and vision exist, if anyone can build EuroCloud they would be wealthy beyond the dreams of mortals and it really just needs to be an OK AWS clone. The unfortunate part is that anyone who sees that far can also see how the story will end when the bureaucrats get involved early instead of after they have multiple billions for compliance. It&#x27;ll cripple any ability the project has to compete.

The reason why Europe won&#x27;t have a cloud is because you can&#x27;t have managed decline and nice things. This is the same reason Europe will forever be depdent on someone else for defence and why it will always be the meek but somehow petulant follower of whoever is the world hegemon. This is why China and Russia cares so little about them also, they know that Europe will fall in line once their current patron no longer can or want to sustain them.