Birbla

Discussion summary

Many European companies rely heavily on US-based vendors like Microsoft, AWS, and Cloudflare, raising concerns about dependency. Discussions include potential alternatives and geopolitical implications.

What the discussion says

  • European reliance on US tech vendors is significant.
  • Some suggest exploring local or alternative providers.
  • Concerns about market shocks and geopolitical influence.
  • European countries are aware but still dependent.
“Dependence on Microsoft and AWS is widespread in Europe.”
— Scroll_Swe
“Europe is currently a US vasall, especially Germany.”
— shevy-java

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  • Hacker News
  • There needs to be more free DDOS offerings and inbuilt DDOS from vm providers.

    There was a period of time where DDOS was always on the news and Cloudflare regularly published 'we stopped a quadrillion request per second attack', and so people who are unlikely to be targets were nether the less terrified of being targeted/running up large bandwidth bills and stuck sites behind Cloudflare as default.

    Should also add not just served by US vendors, but also 'and on American brand servers' seeing as most are Dell & HP with some Super Micro.

    by khurs
  • My anecdotal evidence from France and Germany is that there is very much a trend to look for non-U.S. alternatives which is somewhat recent. It is related to the current government, not really politically motivated but more of a "no guarantees/cannot rely on this partner anymore" thinking coupled with a bit of "WTF annex Denmark, really". Many companies have task forces or projects to investigate moving tech stacks and in the past this was not even an agenda topic (despite strategic advantages and potential cost savings).
    by kriro
  • Interesting read. Canada would be even more US-skewed.

    Canada is lacking in large domestic cloud providers and Canadian companies often use the default US regions of public clouds (e.g. AWS us-east-1) rather than Canada regions (e.g. ca-central-1).

    by dlenski
  • As Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>.
    by TMWNN
  • This is just incorrect with a way too small set of websites. Their estimates are more than double.

    However, that is if you take all websites into account. If you only take the most popular websites/biggest companies, their estimates are closer to reality.

    Source: I have access to better data.

    by JimBlackwood
  • I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired, there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated, and would not want to use a close source tools even though they are developed by European counterparts.

    On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.

    It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool.

    Also processes take forever, and everything has to go through lot of meetings, and bureaucracy and red-tape and no one is willing to take a chance on a small startup.

    by rukshn
  • > It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool.

    I think that’s because people who aren’t part of the open source FOSS camp don’t care where the services they use are based. And the people who don’t care tend to choose whatever is the easiest and most popular option. Hold on, did I just restate your whole point? Maybe I did.

    by gaurana
  • Well it's because few people have "European-ness" as a strong personal value. Some people have strong values around open-source, or even around the specific country, but the sense of being European and valuing European things is just not very widespread, so in absence of a specific personal value, they pick the cheapest/biggest/most-known option which is usually American.

    This is quickly changing though: my subjective take is that the US antagonism is pushing people away from American product AND making the European identity stronger.

    by williamdclt
  • > I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired

    I don't think it's weird: almost nobody cares, they just use whatever they know/is free. It turns out it is US tech. It's the exact same situation in the US, except that for them it is not a sovereignty issue.

    Now maybe there is a bigger open source community in Europe, but I don't see a problem with that.

    by palata
  • There are not many big vendors that are EU first apart from SAP, SuSE and a handful more. Nothing similar to what MS, IBM, Google, Intel, AMD , Nvidia or Meta provide.
    by shellwizard
  • Computer software is so incredibly cheap in a business setting (that includes public sector) compared to all other tools and expenses, that it always makes sense to pay for and use the most feature complete software you can get.
    by carlosjobim
  • You switch from talking about Europe to talking about the EU half way through. The article was about Europe (excluding Russia and a few others).

    > there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated

    Using Cloudflare, AWS etc. does not mean you do not have to keep things updated. Using an SaaS does. The numbers in the article count both.

    There are plenty of people who use FOSS only and non-US hosting, and still use Cloudflare.

    > On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.

    A preference for what they already know (maybe reinforced by marketing). Its not that they prefer American products, but American dominance means it is what everyone already knows.

    by graemep
  • Why would i want an inferior option just because it's made in the EU? I'm not an EU nationalist, i don't care if "EU Tech Companies" are a thing. If anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me.
    by Pragmata
  • I think the reason for this is that if you're targeting folks for whom Europe-sovereignty resonates as an important factor, those will also care about sovereignty and self-sufficiency in general, and thus just skip your SaaS and go right for (semi) self-hosting.

    While for the other side where the sovereignty is not an important factor, it's product quality that matters.

    You can absolutely make a European startup that sells B2B SaaS, successfully, it just has to be better than the competition, and being European will not be enough.

    by cube2222
  • Why does that matter? If US vendors decides to kill the service for EU customer, they can move a webserver on a different VPS within hours. Same for git. Sure you can kill GitHub, but the git repository can be moved somewhere else within minutes.

    However in both cases US vendors will suffer catastrophic trust loss for rest of the world. It would be a lose-lose situation.

    by general1465
  • If the company I work at was forced to leave AWS and put all of our engineering teams to work on this, maybe we would finish it in 6 months, being very optimistic.

    If it were forced to do this immediately, it would shut down.

    Not everything is a simple web server that fits in a VPS. Some systems have thousands of moving parts, and some of those parts are proprietary services that only have one provider.

    by drdexebtjl
  • > The practical point is not that every European company should leave US infrastructure tomorrow. The point is that sovereignty discussions often start too late in the stack. Before organisations debate cloud regions, subprocessors, or contractual controls, they should know which vendors already sit in front of their public web estate.

    This seems like the wrong takeaway and I'd advice (European) companies to do the opposite: Don't look at what your marketing/landing page does first, care first about where your actual user/company data lives, what processors are touching it and so on. Then once you have your internal house in order, then do the easy surface-level stuff like what vendor sits in front of your marketing websites.

    I don't understand why they'd advise people to do things in that suggested order, seems really backwards and like they're more interested in patching over the problem rather than actually solving it.

    > For European infrastructure vendors, this is the market map. For policymakers, it is the base rate. For buyers, it is the inventory problem.

    Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...

    by embedding-shape
  • > Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...

    Yes, it's INFURIATING. I hate, hate, hate this. :(

    Can we start flagging shit like this, please?

    by rrr_oh_man
  • > Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...

    Is it really "slop" if you keep falling for AI written articles again and again? Doesn't that actually mean the opposite - the AI seemingly convinced you (or almost) that it was written by a realy human?

    by neya
  • > Don't look at what your marketing/landing page does first

    True. Also: the landing page and all the other corporate boasting are often run by a marketeer or similar, who knows nothing about the technical part. They just have a design, and outsource implementation. So it just ends up somewhere.

    by tgv
  • "What it means and what it does not": article is clearly written by claude, which for me at this point means that I pay as much attention to it as I do to Claudes output: I skim it and then move on. It actually requires far more effort of me to read it than it was to generate the content. Before it would have always been the other way around. Whoever wrote the article would have had to spend way more time writing it than me reading it.
    by orbifold
  • As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products?

    Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get close to these products / companies and what they offer? Managed environments, automatic scaling, serverless architectures that just work and cover all your needs?

    I'm a big fan of Hetzner, which has great prices, a great managed environment and lot of features that give you a reliable structure to work on, but I don't actually want to manage everything by myself.

    I also use Bunny.net for my products, but the services are still limited and contained to very specific stuff.

    Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe?

    I believe that the problem is mainly structural and cultural. When a new technology comes out, it's usually from US researchers and companies. So how does Europe even stand a (real) chance at giving the world (or the continent) the best packaged services?

    by LucaSiviero
  • For cyber security examples there are real movement in europe - ciphercue is trying to create a directory of alternatives which is gaining traction - https://ciphercue.com/directory/eu

    Maybe going beyond cyber alternatives is whats needed

    by adulion
  • Asking for a complete replacement is how people get locked in. The way governments end up with m365 by putting out an RFP with the exact feature list of m365. Of course then you limit yourself to only one option.

    I think this will start moving a lot now that people are really aware of American dependency and also ethically are opposed to it.

    by wolvoleo
  • Adyen is a big payment processor from the Netherlands which many EU retailers already use. Even with some worldwide customers.
    by gempir
  • There are plenty of alternatives to Stripe. Just search for card processors. If you’re a high-risk merchant, or your product falls into a high-risk category, Stripe will probably reject you. That’s why there’s a big market for other processors to step in.
    by m00dy
  • Most of the 13 root dns servers are American. They're distributed geographically but still owned by American entities
    by itsamario
  • I'm italian too.

    For payments I've used Mollie, which is EU based and has good DX. It also has something critical that Stripe does not: proper customer service. Adyen is also good.

    You're a bit generic on other fronts but Scaleway is an excellent EU-based cloud provider. Haven't missed anything from AWS so far.

    > Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe?

    Why would you even want such a product? Managed postgres for cheap in the low 10s of Euros will scale to lots of users.

    If your problem is scaling you have the best problem in the world, and one that most cloud vendors offer solutions for out of the box.

    Neon is a great solution..which fits a handful of use cases.

    US definitely enjoys an apex position in cloud services, but there's little to no core irreplaceable products beyond leading edge AI in European offerings.

    Cloudflare might be an exception if latency, ddos protection and global reach are important.

    by epolanski
  • > is there a real alternative that covers what they do?

    Have you tried searching the internet for things like "European Stripe alternatives" and things like that? Or you tend to rely on word of mouth and similar?

    I won't claim there are 100% replacements available for everything, but for all the basic functionality of Stripe, Cloudflare, AWS and so on there are tons of options out there, seemingly growing every month, but it does require you to proactively go out and look for them, rather than relying on that you've heard about it since before.

    by embedding-shape
  • Funilly enough, payment might be the area where it's the easiest to find a credible european alternative. Adyen is an enormous PSP Mollie is aiming at smaller companies.

    Scaleway, OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak and others do have pre-packaged, managed services, but you might not find "eveything and anything" that you find at, say, AWS. The other side of the same coin is that you're as vendor-locked if you buid something with one component at SCW, one at Hetzner and the third at Infomaniak... (but you have to manage 3 different invoices...)

    by karambahh