I wonder if a managed K8S approach wouldn’t be better? Most Enterprises I know will anyway need to deploy legacy software, so the need for something like K8S never really goes away. The question is if EU Enterprises really need stuff like AWS Sagemaker rather than just spinning up Jupyter Hub on K8S…
raffael_de · 9h ago
> if EU Enterprises really need stuff like AWS Sagemaker
The author already makes it clear that replicating for example AWS is not desirable.
AWS Sagemaker is basically an app running on EC2 (for Notebooks, training, inference) and S3 for the data. And that's what needs to be set up first: EC2 and S3 (and incidentally also IAM, VPC and SQS).
Unsurprisingly those have been also the first services that AWS released.
sam_lowry_ · 10h ago
It was a wonder to observe Kubernetes take over the server room infrastructure by storm while morphing from being exactly the wrong tool to manage legacy software to the default option for lift-and-shift cloud migrations.
I still wonder how much K8S is a the right platform to deploy database software or weblogic clusters.
But people do it on a massive scale.
sebazzz · 5h ago
> legacy software, so the need for something like K8S never really goes away
TIL software running in Docker containers is legacy.
What cloud kool-aid are you drinking?
hyperman1 · 11h ago
While I like what he says, I wonder how serious I should take him. Is he part of an always ignored fringe group, or can he push his ideas forward? He sounds progressive, and all over Europe the politics shift to conservatism. Also, I've never heard about him on the news, only here on HN.
Politics is unfortunately more about who is talking than what is said.
sam_lowry_ · 9h ago
There is aversion and even outright hatred of techies among EU bureaucrats, so his influence is probably minimal, but Bert is
the most influential Software Engineer in EU circles.
PeterStuer · 8h ago
Believe it or not, Europe is finally taking sovereignty at least a little bit more serious.
It is weird that it took 'Trump' instead of Echelon, Kosovo, Snowden or NordStream just to name a few, but better late than never I guess?
The real question is what the EU will do if and when their neo-con buddies are back in the Whitehouse.
Will they finally have learned the lesson? As it stands, it seems there's still a non negligible contingent of EU administrators that would be very comfortable with things just getting back to where they were.
delbronski · 11h ago
I'd focus on building a modern product that is easier to use, has more transparent pricing and better support, and makes transitioning from AWS/Azure/GCP a breeze. Start simple, and keep iterating. Start with a platform where I can easily deploy my favorite popular web framework and hook it up to a popular SQL database. Most companies just have a web application with a database. Make it super simple to get off App Engine/Elastic, Cloud SQL/RSD GCP/AWS Storage. Get small and midsize customers to switch, and then keep iterating up to big companies. They'll come if the tech and service is solid. It is not that hard to beat the big American cloud providers at this. Their services are bloated, difficult to understand, have poor service, and terrible pricing models.
The reason most EU companies don't want to switch now is because alternatives suck even more and it cost too much time and effort.
bananapub · 11h ago
> I'd focus on building a modern product that is easier to use, has more transparent pricing and better support, and makes transitioning from AWS/Azure/GCP a breeze. Start simple
lol
AWS or GCP is person-millenia of work, and they aren't even "a breeze" to transition between them.
delbronski · 59m ago
We understand cloud solutions a lot better these days. You would not have to start where they started. Think about all the tooling available today versus what was available in 2006 when AWS launched.
constantcrying · 10h ago
>AWS or GCP is person-millenia of work
So is designing and building a passenger aircraft.
fvdessen · 10h ago
I think we should use the airbus model and copy 1 to 1 the AWS platform. Exact same apis, same control panels, same everything, just copy. Start with the most important functions. At least it would be clear what the end goal is and only a matter of funding and execution. It would also make it much easier for existing businesses to migrate away from real aws to euws.
constantcrying · 10h ago
Airbus did not 1 to 1 copy Boeing. It was a completely new plane and with the Airbus A320 they introduced actually innovative things, like fly by wire.
Airbus was also not created from thin air, it was a merger of many aerospace companies.
sam_lowry_ · 12h ago
I really don't understand the obsession with AWS-like EU clouds.
The EU cloud may win only by shifting the paradigm.
Take Microsoft Office as an example.
For many years, Open Source and businesses tried to make a Microsoft Office competitor by mimicking Microsoft Office. Naturally, all clones were worse than the original and they either failed or stuck in their small niche... until Google changed the paradigm and rolled out Google Docs that had a unique feature of online collaboration.
Then was the turn of Microsoft to mimic collaboration features of Google Docs in Microsoft Office and be worse at it almost by definition.
Another example is S3.
For years, businesses tried to have POSIX-capable filesystems seamlessly scale in size and in availability. It took Amazon to roll out a simpler alternative that, by having a smaller set of features, enables so much sought properties of distributed file systems in an efficient and commercially viable way.
Back to EU clouds.
Scaleway tried replicating AWS, but they are and will always be a worse AWS than AWS itself. That Microsoft and Google could force their way through is more of a marketing win and just proves my point.
benterix · 12h ago
Actually S3 is a good example - it became the new de-facto standard for object storage management, and is used both by open source projects like minio and other clouds alike. This benefits the users/customers as switching from AWS S3 to another solution is a bit less painful.
What Amazon did with AWS, offering access to compute, storage and other services, was a good thing, and many EU cloud providers are implementing a small subset of their core services already. It's a good thing, there are no downsides really.
bot403 · 11h ago
The gem of a point here is that a solid set of core services can go a very long way. You don't need to emulate beanstalk, sagemaker, lightsail, appsync and the like.
What you need is CloudFront,vpc, ec2, albs, RDS, S3, ecs, and other base services and many businesses can build a lot of great things.
johannes1234321 · 11h ago
The question is: can you shift the paradigm enough for sometm alternative to S3 storage or so it better to benefit from the ecosystem and differentiate in other ways (legal framework etc)
Any cloud has and will develop there own services as differentiators, but using common standards eases adoption.
rightbyte · 12h ago
> I really don't understand the obsession
I think it is some strange way to try to push for some sort of pan-european jingoism and/or profit from it.
raxxorraxor · 12h ago
Plain and simple, I don't want EU hosted services because the EU isn't a good proprietor. It offers less privacy or speech guarantees than alternative locations.
I am an EU citicen but believe the EU is a lobby group with its proponents often idealists in the best or fanatics in the worst case. Both don't allow any criticism and cannot hold this mostly purely executive behemoth to account. It is fundamentally unbalanced construct that needs strong restrictions. And therefore it would also not be the best place to host anything.
benterix · 12h ago
Good, so go host your stuff wherever you want, it's a free world. We're talking about those people/organizations that made the decision to host in the EU.
raxxorraxor · 9h ago
Well, I do host in the EU because of proximity. But it isn't any dream wonderland hosting place compared to other countries. I have zero EU hosting patrionism.
Instead, this might be in my country in particular though, it tends to promote bad lawyers to serve notices to people that forgot something in their impressum and similar tiny mistakes. Usually a clear abuse of rights but being right and getting justice are two separate things and that is true for the EU as well. In the near future it will demand age vertification for online content. It just is that paternalistic.
Sure, it sucks less than the current UK, an even worse place to host. But maybe just make hosting attractive?
airpoint · 10h ago
The EU has some of the strongest data protection laws in the world, most notably the GDPR which enforces strict rules on how personal data is collected, stored, and used, with significant penalties for violatiions. Independent watchdogs in each country enforce these rules.
Freedom of expression is protected under Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. While the EU allows limited restrictions (like hate speech, incitement to violence, etc), so do most democratic jurisdictions, including the US and UK.
raxxorraxor · 7h ago
As the other comment points out that is an illusion. That is partially what I meant with idealists and fanatics. They don't check the relevant info.
Right now the EU is working to circumvent encryption, it tried to implement chat control and is certainly not done here either. The hate speech excemptions are generalist, so it can be applied to anything. Aside from many ordoliberal nations, that don't have a good record here, it overall is just not attractive to establish hosting.
If you need to circumvent encryption, fine. But don't expect to ever become a digital haven. And you shouldn't, because you aren't attractive. Be attractive, it is that easy.
The US at least has the culture for it. It is on the backfoot to a degree but still ahead of the EU. Perhaps people would even vote for the EU and give it legitimacy.
rdm_blackhole · 8h ago
Can we stop with this illusion that the EU is some kind of personal data protection heaven? This is not true and hasn't been for a while.
The EU just wants the same data as the US except it tries to hide it because it wants to project the image that your data is safe here. But it isn't.
It was overturned after 8 years even though everyone knew it was illegal from day 1. Even after its repeal, some countries have decided that they would keep the data accumulated so far and/or continue collecting it anyway.
- France recently tried to ban E2E to "stop drug trafficking" and "terrorism"
- The EU has been trying to pass Chat Control, a law which would force messaging apps, email providers and social media companies to scan all your personal data with a US made AI and save all your data somewhere that Europol can access. This data could then be searched at will by LEOs without a court order. This law has been on the table for the last 3/4 years and they keep bringing it up because they want to "save the children"
On the freedom of speech:
- Denmark recently started reintroducing blasphemy laws where it is now illegal to burn a religious book. Now that this Rubicon has been crossed, who knows what will happen next.
I don't mind when people compare the EU to the US when it comes to matters related to privacy or freedom of speech, but if we are going to do that, we need to get the facts straight and not repeat ad vitam aeternam things which are not true.
constantcrying · 10h ago
The EU leadership is terrible it is obviously an organization riddled with inefficiency and corruption.
Nevertheless, EU member states are irrelevant on their own. The only way to achieve large scale success is by European nations cooperating on issues like these.
hyperman1 · 12h ago
What's your alternative? The same thing holds for the US services, except we don't have any control. We're basically begging the USA to take our money and fuck us over.
Meanwhile, airbus works, GSM works, so Europe is capable of doing this if it wants to. Yes, it has been asleep at the wheel since 2000 or so, but Trump is busy kicking them back awake.
Havoc · 11h ago
The various cloud primitives like s3 and cloud functions are making good progress but don’t see anything with the breadth and integration of US clouds appearing any time soon.
Then again anyone building on that sort of integration is likely locked in on a provider level never mind country
PeterStuer · 8h ago
In the "Coherent Strategy" I miss a point 12 that says: European Digital Service companies should be stimulated and anchored in the EU. If deemed strategic, regulation should prevent non-EU ownership participation.
As the past has shown, it's too easy for the printers of the 'world reserve currency' to just scoop up any emerging company with what is basically infinite monopoly money.
sam_lowry_ · 9h ago
Euro-stack.eu which is referenced in the first paragraph runs on Wordpress.com (Automattic) and is "protected" by Cloudflare.
Both are US companies.
Moreover, their Letter to EU Commission is written in Microsoft Word and converted to PDF using Adobe software.
For every step, they preferred US products.
Nothing surprising, the text author is a random young lady from UK, if we trust the document properties.
How pathetic (
ETH_start · 12h ago
Economic development is too complex to be micromanaged from the top down. It also suffers from the kind of trade barriers this plan advocates.
Most importantly, all economic development initiatives face an uphill challenge if the underlying macro conditions aren't right.
The solution for the UK, the EU and Canada is simple but politically anathema: cut taxes
A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines.
Does this innovation in the form of patents increase the quality of life in the country? Not everything is fixed by "numbers go up", it matters where those numbers end up. If they end up in the hands of the wealthy, the quality of life for the average person will most likely decrease or stagnate at best. Taxation is at the moment the only realistic way (stronger unions might work as well) to make sure that not all of the gains from innovation go to the already wealthy. The average person in many parts of Europe is more satisfied with their life than the average person in the US and other more business friendly countries, even if the numbers are lower on paper.
So even if cutting taxes would help create the kind of innovation the EU needs, it might not be worth the cost. We need to come up with ways to encourage innovation that don't involve giving more wealth and power to those who already have the most.
nottorp · 12h ago
This is about software.
Companies patent software just to have legal ammunition to fight other companies that patent software.
# of patents in software is not a measure of innovation but of how litigious the business environment is.
> Helicopter money by supplying large amounts of funds
How about "helicopter money" for any EU cloud provider that develops tools to migrate data out of the big US providers?
After all, no matter which US cloud provider you choose, you're locked in even wrt to other US cloud providers.
raxxorraxor · 12h ago
Patens aren't a good indicator for software, but it can be a metric for the ability to innovate. And this probably can be applied to software, not the patents themselves. Capital collected by the state is just so much less effective.
constantcrying · 10h ago
No. There is no relevant strategy which does not answer "who is going to build it". The 11 Points are irrelevant unless you can actually create a real product and create real corporations providing these services.
Point 6 "following the Airbus model", would mean a decade(s) long funding run to create a company to compete directly with US tech supremacy. This is what was (for very unclear reasons) rejected in the section before.
There currently is zero actual competition with these US companies. EU companies each compete in very small niches (just like EU companies competed as suppliers for Boeing). Unless you create an actual competitor, there is no solution. The belief that you just need standards and many small, decentralized operators is what is making US Tech so dominant. They are dominant because you can go to these US companies and get most of what you need from a single source, this greatly reduces complexity overhead and the need for competent staff. Dealing with myriad of small service providers and their individual differences and compatibility issues is not effective, efficient or competitive.
Europe needs an actual competitor, who can actually replace US tech companies. Insisting on the fantasy of decentralization is what is making US dominance certain.
The author already makes it clear that replicating for example AWS is not desirable.
AWS Sagemaker is basically an app running on EC2 (for Notebooks, training, inference) and S3 for the data. And that's what needs to be set up first: EC2 and S3 (and incidentally also IAM, VPC and SQS).
Unsurprisingly those have been also the first services that AWS released.
I still wonder how much K8S is a the right platform to deploy database software or weblogic clusters.
But people do it on a massive scale.
TIL software running in Docker containers is legacy.
What cloud kool-aid are you drinking?
Politics is unfortunately more about who is talking than what is said.
It is weird that it took 'Trump' instead of Echelon, Kosovo, Snowden or NordStream just to name a few, but better late than never I guess?
The real question is what the EU will do if and when their neo-con buddies are back in the Whitehouse.
Will they finally have learned the lesson? As it stands, it seems there's still a non negligible contingent of EU administrators that would be very comfortable with things just getting back to where they were.
The reason most EU companies don't want to switch now is because alternatives suck even more and it cost too much time and effort.
lol
AWS or GCP is person-millenia of work, and they aren't even "a breeze" to transition between them.
So is designing and building a passenger aircraft.
Airbus was also not created from thin air, it was a merger of many aerospace companies.
The EU cloud may win only by shifting the paradigm.
Take Microsoft Office as an example.
For many years, Open Source and businesses tried to make a Microsoft Office competitor by mimicking Microsoft Office. Naturally, all clones were worse than the original and they either failed or stuck in their small niche... until Google changed the paradigm and rolled out Google Docs that had a unique feature of online collaboration.
Then was the turn of Microsoft to mimic collaboration features of Google Docs in Microsoft Office and be worse at it almost by definition.
Another example is S3.
For years, businesses tried to have POSIX-capable filesystems seamlessly scale in size and in availability. It took Amazon to roll out a simpler alternative that, by having a smaller set of features, enables so much sought properties of distributed file systems in an efficient and commercially viable way.
Back to EU clouds.
Scaleway tried replicating AWS, but they are and will always be a worse AWS than AWS itself. That Microsoft and Google could force their way through is more of a marketing win and just proves my point.
What Amazon did with AWS, offering access to compute, storage and other services, was a good thing, and many EU cloud providers are implementing a small subset of their core services already. It's a good thing, there are no downsides really.
What you need is CloudFront,vpc, ec2, albs, RDS, S3, ecs, and other base services and many businesses can build a lot of great things.
Any cloud has and will develop there own services as differentiators, but using common standards eases adoption.
I think it is some strange way to try to push for some sort of pan-european jingoism and/or profit from it.
I am an EU citicen but believe the EU is a lobby group with its proponents often idealists in the best or fanatics in the worst case. Both don't allow any criticism and cannot hold this mostly purely executive behemoth to account. It is fundamentally unbalanced construct that needs strong restrictions. And therefore it would also not be the best place to host anything.
Instead, this might be in my country in particular though, it tends to promote bad lawyers to serve notices to people that forgot something in their impressum and similar tiny mistakes. Usually a clear abuse of rights but being right and getting justice are two separate things and that is true for the EU as well. In the near future it will demand age vertification for online content. It just is that paternalistic.
Sure, it sucks less than the current UK, an even worse place to host. But maybe just make hosting attractive?
Freedom of expression is protected under Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. While the EU allows limited restrictions (like hate speech, incitement to violence, etc), so do most democratic jurisdictions, including the US and UK.
Right now the EU is working to circumvent encryption, it tried to implement chat control and is certainly not done here either. The hate speech excemptions are generalist, so it can be applied to anything. Aside from many ordoliberal nations, that don't have a good record here, it overall is just not attractive to establish hosting.
If you need to circumvent encryption, fine. But don't expect to ever become a digital haven. And you shouldn't, because you aren't attractive. Be attractive, it is that easy.
The US at least has the culture for it. It is on the backfoot to a degree but still ahead of the EU. Perhaps people would even vote for the EU and give it legitimacy.
The EU just wants the same data as the US except it tries to hide it because it wants to project the image that your data is safe here. But it isn't.
Regarding your argument about data protection:
- The data retention directive passed in 2006 to give unlimited access to all your data to LEOs without a court order: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
It was overturned after 8 years even though everyone knew it was illegal from day 1. Even after its repeal, some countries have decided that they would keep the data accumulated so far and/or continue collecting it anyway.
- France recently tried to ban E2E to "stop drug trafficking" and "terrorism"
- The EU has been trying to pass Chat Control, a law which would force messaging apps, email providers and social media companies to scan all your personal data with a US made AI and save all your data somewhere that Europol can access. This data could then be searched at will by LEOs without a court order. This law has been on the table for the last 3/4 years and they keep bringing it up because they want to "save the children"
On the freedom of speech:
- Denmark recently started reintroducing blasphemy laws where it is now illegal to burn a religious book. Now that this Rubicon has been crossed, who knows what will happen next.
- In many European countries it is becoming increasingly harder for journalists to do their jobs properly https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/apr/29/media-freedom-...
I don't mind when people compare the EU to the US when it comes to matters related to privacy or freedom of speech, but if we are going to do that, we need to get the facts straight and not repeat ad vitam aeternam things which are not true.
Nevertheless, EU member states are irrelevant on their own. The only way to achieve large scale success is by European nations cooperating on issues like these.
Meanwhile, airbus works, GSM works, so Europe is capable of doing this if it wants to. Yes, it has been asleep at the wheel since 2000 or so, but Trump is busy kicking them back awake.
Then again anyone building on that sort of integration is likely locked in on a provider level never mind country
As the past has shown, it's too easy for the printers of the 'world reserve currency' to just scoop up any emerging company with what is basically infinite monopoly money.
Both are US companies.
Moreover, their Letter to EU Commission is written in Microsoft Word and converted to PDF using Adobe software.
For every step, they preferred US products.
Nothing surprising, the text author is a random young lady from UK, if we trust the document properties.
How pathetic (
Most importantly, all economic development initiatives face an uphill challenge if the underlying macro conditions aren't right. The solution for the UK, the EU and Canada is simple but politically anathema: cut taxes
A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines.
The study is quite rigorous too:
https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/tax-cuts-and...
So even if cutting taxes would help create the kind of innovation the EU needs, it might not be worth the cost. We need to come up with ways to encourage innovation that don't involve giving more wealth and power to those who already have the most.
Companies patent software just to have legal ammunition to fight other companies that patent software.
# of patents in software is not a measure of innovation but of how litigious the business environment is.
> Helicopter money by supplying large amounts of funds
How about "helicopter money" for any EU cloud provider that develops tools to migrate data out of the big US providers?
After all, no matter which US cloud provider you choose, you're locked in even wrt to other US cloud providers.
Point 6 "following the Airbus model", would mean a decade(s) long funding run to create a company to compete directly with US tech supremacy. This is what was (for very unclear reasons) rejected in the section before.
There currently is zero actual competition with these US companies. EU companies each compete in very small niches (just like EU companies competed as suppliers for Boeing). Unless you create an actual competitor, there is no solution. The belief that you just need standards and many small, decentralized operators is what is making US Tech so dominant. They are dominant because you can go to these US companies and get most of what you need from a single source, this greatly reduces complexity overhead and the need for competent staff. Dealing with myriad of small service providers and their individual differences and compatibility issues is not effective, efficient or competitive.
Europe needs an actual competitor, who can actually replace US tech companies. Insisting on the fantasy of decentralization is what is making US dominance certain.