Introduction

As the trade war between the US and Europe is intensifying with tariffs over steel, aluminum, and liquor being proposed back and forth, this also opens a train of thought on what it would mean if this trade war would expand to the digital territory. With the changing dynamics between the EU and the US, one might want to rethink the dependency EU-based companies have on American cloud services.

A quick snapshot of the cloud services market teaches us that AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure alone are responsible for 63% percent of market share, giving these US-based companies a firm hold on cloud services. One could go as far as comparing this to NATO’s dependency on the US for protecting their own borders.

As a result, European businesses have become more and more dependent on cloud services offered by American companies for a variety of tools like collaboration, communication, and hosting. Don’t get me wrong, they offer fantastic technology, but do we really want to store all our data with a US-based company? What about data sovereignty, the CLOUD Act, and EU regulations?

What does this situation mean for the continuity of your company? How do you make sure your cloud services are future-proof?

Balancing providers

Today, operating a business without any American involvement in the IT landscape is nearly impossible. There are simply no viable European alternatives for all the tools that one needs. 

But for hosting applications, this might be somewhat easier.

We recently had an internal discussion and came to the conclusion that the current state of the European market can be compared to the one we were in about 15 years ago when the first US hyperscalers started to operate. Back then, there were hardly any businesses that were moving all their workloads to the cloud.

Companies began experimenting with cloud services but were initially reluctant to trust them with their most valuable data and applications. They started with small digital campaigns, websites, and applications. It was a process of becoming familiar with the technology, auto-scaling, and often adopting new development and deployment methodologies.

This reliance on US-based hyperscalers has grown over time, especially as developers have embraced their Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. This includes services such as Message brokers, queues, API Management services, and serverless computing, which offer infinite scalability and availability on demand. While these services often had a positive effect on the development cycle, it also increased the lock-in at these US hyperscalers.

European cloud providers generally offer similar services, including compute (virtual machines), networking, Kubernetes, and storage. So, what would be required to make a similar move to these European alternatives, should you choose to take that route?

Well, do the same as we did when we started using the US hyperscalers: start small and experiment! Get acquainted with the platforms, their technology, and options. Set up hybrid solutions using both European and American clouds so it's easy to compare while also getting a proper feeling on the reliability the European Cloud platforms offer.

By doing this, you are actively supporting the European cloud providers, which helps them grow and continue to develop their services. The growth for these providers can go at a much faster pace as they can learn from all the lessons learned from the recent past and mirror the actions of the US hyperscalers.

Cloud without limits

From a development perspective, we think it makes sense to architect your new solutions in such a way that they are more cloud agnostic. All the cloud providers (both US and EU) offer services for running workloads in containers.

We would advise to try to avoid services specific to that cloud provider, like API management solutions, data processing technology, or serverless computing that are not agnostic. For most of these building blocks, solutions exist that can be run in a container and deployed on all the cloud providers.

In layman’s terms, adopting these solutions would make sure all of your ‘cloud services’ eggs are not in the same basket.

Let’s be clear: the dependency on American Cloud services is real and something that cannot be ignored at this moment.

However, by strategically adopting European cloud services and designing cloud-agnostic architectures, businesses can gradually reduce their dependency on US hyperscalers while simultaneously supporting the growth of the European cloud ecosystem.