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First Attempt: Open Telekom Cloud

Second Attempt: Scaleway

Scaleway: Serverless Function

First Steps into the European Cloud

How did I get here? What am I trying to achieve? What are my assumptions?

I'm a cloud infrastructure engineer by trade, located in the Netherlands. I've worked with Amazon Web Services for the past 7 years for various Dutch organizations and companies. Deploying and maintaining a wide variety of SaaS and PaaS services through infrastructure as code has been my main focus.

But, the ground is shifting under our feet. Dark clouds are on the horizon, as the Dutch government and parliament have also recognized. Dependence on an American service provider for our infrastructure does not offer Europeans the resilience we would like. The EU has also emphasized the need for Digital Sovereignty.

So: we need European alternatives. Thankfully, Constantin Graf has already created a website cataloguing European alternatives. This is by far the best resource I've been able to find on this front. This is where I'll search for alternative solutions first. Surely many others exist. Constantin's work frankly could use some serious competition.

But first, we need some basic assumptions.I don't want to have to learn a lot of new skills. Migrating between the big three American cloud providers isn't fun, but it doesn't require you to start from scratch. Where possible I want to use my knowledge of AWS infrastructure deployment. So what kinds of tools would I need?

  • I really want to use infrastructure as code. Ideally, I would like to use an Terraform provider.
  • For compute resources, I don't want to be dependent on Virtual Machines only. Managed Kubernetes is an absolute minimum. Containers as a service and serverless functions would make an option a whole lot more attractive.
  • IAM tools that make secure access easier would be highly appreciated.
  • SaaS, SaaS, SaaS! In order to transfer stacks from a landscape like AWS, a large number of key SaaS features would be very useful. Of course all sorts and types of databases, issues like networking, certificates, messaging, etc. etc. etc.