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.
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.
IP reputation lists predate Gmail by many years (eg spamhaus). I know Gmail used to use them, and may still. It would obviously make sense to keep their own stats as well.
I've successfully exited Google Workspace for email, calendar and contacts about two years ago. Went with Fastmail. It's been rock solid.
Unfortunately, Drive and Voice are keeping me subscribed to their service despite me wanting VERY BADLY to exit it. Neither have good alternatives that check all the boxes.
Sure but let's start with not having all citizens' sensitive data that EU state orgs store in american cloud, and then we can talk about creating an EU based alternative to google/apple in mobile.
The people who need to allocate software resources aren't "the government" writ broadly, they're specific people who operate specific organizations within it. You run a team within your local ministry of housing, and you identify a new analysis you want to run monthly that will take a day on a 12-core Spark cluster. Do you:
* clear out a supply closet, buy 12 new machines to put in it, and idle them for 97% of the year
* ask 12 employees to please deliver their computers to the supply closet on the last Friday of each month
* email Emmanuel Macron asking him to find another team who already cleared out their supply closet with spare cycles
Or do you just use the cloud and not have to solve an operational challenge every time you have a new idea? (The actual pre-cloud status quo was that most people simply couldn't implement any idea that would require more than 1 personal computer.)
They built their own internal clouds, to varying degrees of jankiness depending on how important large scale compute was to their business. It was very important for Spotify, so they had a bunch of people working on it, to the degree that it was hurting focus on their core business goals.
In less tech-forward organizations, you usually just had "the server", and it was rude or even forbidden to just run programs on it on your own initiative. You had to coordinate which programs you wanted to run when. And you'd better make sure your program doesn't have a memory leak or something, because then nobody will be able to check their emails until the sysadmin fixes it.
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.
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.
There are European cloud providers though. American hyper scalers are not the only option. Lidl, Hetzner, OVH, ..etc.
I can spin up a dedicated server within 24-48hours or a VM within minutes on OVH. Also there have been plenty of white papers written about how much more expensive AWS is when compared to Hetzner or OVH.
The big cloud providers are quite expensive and come with a lot of geopolitical risk/baggage. European governments have safer alternatives within their own borders.
Edit: it’s Lidl who launched a cloud service not Aldi
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.
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.
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.
Infrastructure is one thing. How many companies that change to a purely EU infrastructure would be routing some of their customer data through 3rd party data processors in the US? I've had to map out 3rd party data flows and it is a daunting task and eye opening even when using applications that map out the TCP and UDP flows.
Do people then null route all the CIDR blocks in the US and all US based CDN's? Has anyone been daring enough to try this yet? I predict DNS to be the first single point of success even assuming one uses a EU specific TLD for all domains.
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.
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).
>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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cut out the unnecessary layers separating them so far. Cut out the middle management fat layers. Become leaner.
There is no sensible way to do that, it is quiet deeply ingrained in our culture. Short of a revolution, I guess we are doomed.
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.
Have you tried to migrate out of Gmail / outlook?
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.
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.
Is there a public list of these IPs? Any legal way an EU citizen can dispute it?
No, just wishes, more sketchy data brokers who claim they have the blacklists and prayers to the US monopolies.
And the question becomes why in 2026 should the EU bow to the wishes of US monopolies?
Anyone can build an email service. Anyone can build a “cloud”. Anyone can build a spreadsheet.
Good riddance.
IP reputation lists predate Gmail by many years (eg spamhaus). I know Gmail used to use them, and may still. It would obviously make sense to keep their own stats as well.
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I've successfully exited Google Workspace for email, calendar and contacts about two years ago. Went with Fastmail. It's been rock solid.
Unfortunately, Drive and Voice are keeping me subscribed to their service despite me wanting VERY BADLY to exit it. Neither have good alternatives that check all the boxes.
Not sure about voice, but for Drive shouldn’t it be straightforward with any thin client on top of a eu object storage?
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/object-storage-pro...
There are apps that can map them as a drive directly for your pc/mac/linux
> They literally reject your emails. There is also nothing you can do if ms/google black lists you.
There are so many ESPs that do not get rejected. Neither is it true that there isn't anything you can do if you end up on a blacklist.
That's not to say that it's trivial, but it's certainly doable.
Yes I did and it is no problem at all.
>But they all run Microsoft online email, Entra and so on themselves.
On their iPhones with Apple IDs.
Yes but the discussion is about data stored on the cloud, not the devices people use.
It should be both if sovereignty isn't just a buzzword.
Sure but let's start with not having all citizens' sensitive data that EU state orgs store in american cloud, and then we can talk about creating an EU based alternative to google/apple in mobile.
iCloud is a thing. Your Apple device syncs many things on the cloud.
I really hope that people in state orgs do not store citizens' sensitive data on their phones.
Not a lot of European alternatives. Jolla is the only one that comes to mind.
Moving email to private and physicaly owned server should always be the first step.
If you're government then you can use on-prem, why TF do you need "cloud"?.
It's not like suddenly your user base(national population) could double overnight and you need such levels of scalability.
The people who need to allocate software resources aren't "the government" writ broadly, they're specific people who operate specific organizations within it. You run a team within your local ministry of housing, and you identify a new analysis you want to run monthly that will take a day on a 12-core Spark cluster. Do you:
* clear out a supply closet, buy 12 new machines to put in it, and idle them for 97% of the year
* ask 12 employees to please deliver their computers to the supply closet on the last Friday of each month
* email Emmanuel Macron asking him to find another team who already cleared out their supply closet with spare cycles
Or do you just use the cloud and not have to solve an operational challenge every time you have a new idea? (The actual pre-cloud status quo was that most people simply couldn't implement any idea that would require more than 1 personal computer.)
>The actual pre-cloud status quo was that most people simply couldn't implement any idea that would require more than 1 personal computer.
How did Spotify manage at the beginning without the cloud? How did any other company?
They built their own internal clouds, to varying degrees of jankiness depending on how important large scale compute was to their business. It was very important for Spotify, so they had a bunch of people working on it, to the degree that it was hurting focus on their core business goals.
In less tech-forward organizations, you usually just had "the server", and it was rude or even forbidden to just run programs on it on your own initiative. You had to coordinate which programs you wanted to run when. And you'd better make sure your program doesn't have a memory leak or something, because then nobody will be able to check their emails until the sysadmin fixes it.
You might ask the US gov why they use cloud if they could do it "on prem"
And the answer is, only a very select gov clients have the $ and the skills to do it
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.
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.
Yes, I'm not against this
But cloud offers flexibility and economies of scale (regardless of who's running it)
There are European cloud providers though. American hyper scalers are not the only option. Lidl, Hetzner, OVH, ..etc.
I can spin up a dedicated server within 24-48hours or a VM within minutes on OVH. Also there have been plenty of white papers written about how much more expensive AWS is when compared to Hetzner or OVH.
The big cloud providers are quite expensive and come with a lot of geopolitical risk/baggage. European governments have safer alternatives within their own borders.
Edit: it’s Lidl who launched a cloud service not Aldi
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.
Skills can be hired and trained.
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.
It's easy until the shit hits the fan...
> 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...
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.
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.
> 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
Infrastructure is one thing. How many companies that change to a purely EU infrastructure would be routing some of their customer data through 3rd party data processors in the US? I've had to map out 3rd party data flows and it is a daunting task and eye opening even when using applications that map out the TCP and UDP flows.
Do people then null route all the CIDR blocks in the US and all US based CDN's? Has anyone been daring enough to try this yet? I predict DNS to be the first single point of success even assuming one uses a EU specific TLD for all domains.
Is this something the EU can just decide on?
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.
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The EU is great at debating. They'll still be debating this in 10 years.
Why is China able to use its own cloud but not EU? Same with AI.
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 they just ban US tech and then the local companies don't have any choice beside building something themselves.
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).
Should have been done years ago
America was trusted years ago.
Hindsight is 20/20
It is a step in the right direction, but time is a key factor also. Do not take it easy, hurry up.
Imperative to stop the data leak this month (Maj 2026).
It's completely insane that any sovereign government would let ANY foreign government have ANY control over the data.
What in the world let the EU countries into this situation.
>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
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.
Saw. Not see. It can’t always be said in public but European governments all know now.
"EU weighs" = ten more years of committees
Same as "Macron demands".
More brunches needed to develop the concept of a plan
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.
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.
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There is no way Europe can do anything that angers America. Sad but True
Strait of Hormuz?
Europe can not even defend Greenland
Why not focus on having something actually competetive with AWS / gcp / azure? And not, hetzner and OVH are not it.
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.
having something actually competitive with AWS / gcp / azure
They simply can't. It would have happened by now.
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.
It demands a lot of resources and EU is also known for over regulations. In the case of OVH, they announced targeting SMEs with no plan to go bigger.
Schwarz Digits, maybe?
I have got lots of downvotes and no critical comments. Why?