Digital sovereignty: How much progress have European cloud providers made?

Requirements
We compare European cloud providers with each other as well as with the leading hyper-scalers Azure, AWS, and GCP. For this article, however, we are only including Microsoft Azure as a reference hyperscaler. We have defined requirements that each of the pro viders must fulfill in order to enable a fair evaluation and thus a meaningful comparison:

Certifications:
Certified providers are essential for both SMEs and large companies if they are to have certainty about their operational capability.

Standards:
To enable easy migration between providers, they need to use open standards and open software. There are often major differences, especially when it comes to databases and server infrastructure. Range of features: As we will see later on, many of the providers have a similar range of features. To guarantee a minimum level of quality for the operation of our software, we have defined various levels for deployments. To move from simple Docker applications to large distributed systems, our providers need to be able to do more than just OpenStack.

Developer experience:
A large product portfolio is important. But standards that help developers manage rapid prototypes and long­term deployments are just as critical. That makes support for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) essential. We opted for Terraform, one of the best­known cloud­agnostic tools among developers.
Billing cycles: Some workloads are only active for a few minutes to hours. These should not be billed as a whole month.

Our providers
With these requirements in place, we can now proceed to selection of the providers. STACKIT, Lidl’s new cloud service, needs to be among them. Then there is Hetzner, which is known for its affordable and high­performance cloud servers. IONOS is a well­known provider for SMEs in the German market. But it was not only German pro viders who were tested: The French Scaleway and the Swiss Exoscale were also represented in our test. The final provider selected was Open Telekom Cloud, one of the first offerings on the European market.

Hetzner
As already mentioned, Hetzner has long been known for its affordable virtual machines. Hetzner also offers a first-class open-source developed Terraform provider, so it comes with an excellent developer experience. Unfortunately, Hetzner does not score highly in terms of features. Apart from the VPCs, there are only a few man­ aged services like object storage and network tools such as firewalls and load bal­ ancers. The operation of a Kubernetes cluster or other distributed services is a plus for Hetzner, but you cannot expect real hyperscaler quality. Hetzner offers hourly billing for its resources, always rounded up to the nearest hour.

IONOS and Exoscale
The first thing that catches the eye with IONOS, the cloud from 1&1, is the virtual cloud configurator. It is a tool in which you can provision services and create entire networks by dragging and dropping. This makes it suitable for small businesses that don’t want to have to bother with the infrastructure. However, our focus is on IaC. The big difference between it and Hetzner is the other managed services such as DBaaS and Kubernetes. However, these are standard for many European cloud providers, which is why the competition is greatest here. Like Hetzner, IONOS offers hourly billing. The Swiss provider Exoscale has a similar offering to IONOS, but is aimed at a different target group. While IONOS is very beginnerfriendly thanks to tools such as the virtual cloud configurator, Exoscale is more focused on IaC and the developer experience. Exoscale also offers per-second billing.

Scaleway
Scaleway is certainly not unknown, but until recently we had never worked with the French provider. We were pleasantly surprised at how much Scaleway has to offer. In addition to the typical VMs, DBaaS and Managed Kubernetes, Scaleway also offers serverless functions and containers. Only Kubernetes is used for the serverless containers in the background, and private container images must be uploaded to the Scaleway Container Registry. However, this is the simplest hosting of our infrastructure to date. Log aggregation and metrics are integrated directly into the platform with the Grafana and Prometheus open source tools, which have ready made dashboards. Scaleway is definitely way ahead of the compe­ tition and has been in the market long enough to serve as a secure alterna­ tive for smaller workloads. However, there are no data centers in Germany. We were also unable to find any precise information on the billing periods for Scaleway. There are usagebased services such as serverless functions and containers, but there are also services such as DBaaS, which are billed by the hour.

STACKIT
We initially had a negative experience with STACKIT. The Schwarz Group’s cloud, to which Lidl also belongs, is being touted in the news as the German AWS. STACKIT is a long way off being that. Although we configured everything according to the instruc­ tions via Terraform, the resources some­ times took several hours to function perfectly. A Kubernetes cluster, for example, took up to eight hours. This turned out to be due to an error in the Terraform provider, which did not take over the standard DNS from the network zone. Unfortunately, the support team took several weeks to find a solution, and the documentation was not very informative either. Nevertheless, we would like to praise the support response: After my report was published, one of the STACKIT engineers got in touch and helped us out. Never­  theless, STACKIT had other problems and idiosyncrasies around the issue of identity and access management. That’s because everything is somewhat more complex than it is with the European competitors. Although there is a greater range of features than with the other German-speaking providers, STACKIT does not come close to Scaleway. I asked the engineer about the possibility of starting container apps. We were puzzled by the high prices, until the engineer told us that the platform is aimed at larger customers rather than SMEs. Anyone familiar with the prices of the major hyperscalers will not be surprised. Like all German providers in this comparison, STACKIT charges on an hourly basis.

Open Telekom Cloud
We wish we could tell you something about Open Telekom Cloud, but even after two weeks we were unable to interact with the cloud via the UI or Terraform. Apparently we had no user rights. However, the creator of the organization in OTC was also unable to create a server. The OTC dashboard fails regularly and is not accessible, the UI is inconsistent, and a lot of information for general use is not further documented. This is a shame, because the Magenta Cloud comes closest to the hyperscalers in terms of features.

We urgently need alternatives for our infrastructure in Europe – given the current situation, there can be no question about that. As our test shows, however, we are still a long way from migrating all our workloads to our domestic providers. Each of the providers compared offers server hosting, and even minimal providers such as Hetzner allow a Kubernetes cluster to be set up and operated. We found that each provider addresses a specific niche and aligns its offering accordingly. In the case of large hyperscalers, organizations need to make increased use of cloudnative and cloud-agnostic technologies. A vendor lock-in through proprietary services such as serverless functions, closed-source databases or specific IaC tools should be avoided in order to allow flexible migration. In addition, a multi-cloud strategy, in which workloads are distributed across multiple providers, can increase fail safety and data sovereignty. Recent reports of outages, the possibility of a digital tax, and new providers such as STACKIT are adding further momentum to the debate. Digital sovereignty in the cloud context remains an issue that the entire industry will be following closely.