Being able to stay compliant and protect revenue is worth far more than quibbling over which cloud costs a little less or much a monthly salary for an employee is in various countries.
The real ratio to look at is cloud spend vs. the revenue.
For me, switching from AWS to European providers wasn’t just about saving on cloud bills (though that was a nice bonus). It was about reducing risk and enabling revenue. Relying on U.S. hyperscalers in Europe is becoming too risky — what happens if Safe Harbor doesn’t get renewed? Or if Schrems III (or whatever comes next) finally forces regulators to act?
If you want to win big enterprise and governmental deals, Then you got to do whatever it takes and being compliant and in charge is a huge part of that.
If you want me to assess what I would be needing the next 5-10 years, I'd make a very different thread here on HN.
The defining conditions is my current setup and business requirement. It works well and we've resisted pretending that we know where we will be in 5 years.
I am reminded of the 2023 story of the surprisingly simple infra of Stack Overflow[1] and the 2025 story of that Stack overflow is almost dead[2]
Given that the setup works now, one can't add that it is only working "for now". I see no client demand in the foreseeable future leading me to think that this has been fundamentally architected incorrectly.
The ISO 27001 has me audited for just that (disaster recovery and monitoring) so that settles it, no?
Also worth noting that these are the two things you don't really get from the hyperscalers. If you want to count on more than their uptime guarantees, you have to roll some DR yourself and while you might think that this is easy, it is not easier than doing it with Terraform and Ansible on other clouds.
I have had my DR and monitoring audited in its AWS and EU version. One was no easier or harder than the other.
But the EU setup gave me a clear answer to clients on CLOUD act, Shrems II, GDPR, Safe Harbor, which is a competitive advantage.
A thing we learned in this process is that there's many levels of abstraction which you can think of rollback and locking down SSH and so on and so forth.
If your abstraction level is AWS and the big hyperscalers, it would be to use Kubernetes, but peeling layers of complexity off that, you could also do it with Docker Compose or even Linux programs that are really battle tested for decades.
Most ISO certified companies are not at hyperscale so here is a fun one: Instead of Grafana Agent from 2020, you could most likely get away better with rsyslog from 2004.
And if you want your EKS cluster to give you insights you have configure CloudWatch yourself so does what hands-off is there comparing that setup to Ubuntu+Grafana Agent?
I have not experienced this in spite of rumours online. As I mention in these two comments, given these we decided to design our way around it by assuming that they would both go down at some point of time (but not at the same time).
Being able to stay compliant and protect revenue is worth far more than quibbling over which cloud costs a little less.
The real ratio to look at is cloud spend vs. the revenue.
For me, switching from AWS to European providers wasn’t just about saving on cloud bills (though that was a nice bonus). It was about reducing risk and enabling revenue. Relying on U.S. hyperscalers in Europe is becoming too risky — what happens if Safe Harbor doesn’t get renewed? Or if Schrems III (or whatever comes next) finally forces regulators to act?
I see where you’re coming from — no doubt, services like SQS and S3 make it easier to build reliable, distributed systems without reinventing the wheel. But for me, the decision to shift to European cloud providers wasn’t about wanting to build my own primitives or take on unnecessary complexity. It was about mitigating regulatory risk and protecting revenue.
When you rely heavily on U.S. hyperscalers in Europe, you’re exposed to potential disruptions — what if data transfer agreements break down or new rulings force major changes? The value of cloud spend, in my view, isn’t just in engineering convenience, but in how it helps sustain the business and unlock growth. That’s why I prioritized compliance and risk reduction — even if that means stepping a little outside the comfort of the big providers’ managed services.
Yes, web apps all need logging, performance dashboard, redundancy, DB backups and such.
This could be a stack that could be parametrised with sound defaults just requiring some terraform provider credentials as well as a path to an executable web app and a choice of database engine.
ISO readiness built-in and abstracted at the OS level rather than programming language level.
If anyone wants to "assetize" what I built, reach out at jk@datapult.dk. I bring a battle-tested setup that has been ISO certified by independent auditors.
You bring clients directly or indirectly with marketing/growth hacking mindset.
You’re describing exactly the kind of vendor lock-in treadmill I was trying to avoid. What you see as “rapid iteration” looks a lot like redoing the same work every few months because of shifting cloud-native limitations.
Also, the idea that using VPS or non-hyperscaler clouds means “poorly integrated and insecure mess” feels like AWS marketing talking. Good ops doesn’t mean gatekeepers — it means understanding your system so you don’t need to swap out components every quarter because the last choice didn’t scale as promised.
I’d rather spend time building something stable that aligns with my compliance and revenue goals, than chasing the latest AWS feature set. And by the way, someone still has to keep all that AWS software up to date — you’ve just outsourced it and locked yourself into their way of doing it.
People keep comparing cloud costs to employee costs, but I think that’s the wrong metric. The real ratio to look at is cloud spend vs. the revenue you can unlock.
For me, switching from AWS to European providers wasn’t just about saving on cloud bills (though that was a nice bonus). It was about reducing risk and enabling revenue. Relying on U.S. hyperscalers in Europe is becoming too risky — what happens if Safe Harbor doesn’t get renewed? Or if Schrems III (or whatever comes next) finally forces regulators to act?
Being able to stay compliant and protect revenue is worth far more than quibbling over which cloud costs a little less.
Being able to stay compliant and protect revenue is worth far more than quibbling over which cloud costs a little less or much a monthly salary for an employee is in various countries.
The real ratio to look at is cloud spend vs. the revenue.
For me, switching from AWS to European providers wasn’t just about saving on cloud bills (though that was a nice bonus). It was about reducing risk and enabling revenue. Relying on U.S. hyperscalers in Europe is becoming too risky — what happens if Safe Harbor doesn’t get renewed? Or if Schrems III (or whatever comes next) finally forces regulators to act?
If you want to win big enterprise and governmental deals, Then you got to do whatever it takes and being compliant and in charge is a huge part of that.