The global backlash against the second Donald Trump administration keeps on growing. Canadians have boycotted US-made products, anti–Elon Musk posters have appeared across London amid widespread Tesla protests, and European officials have drastically increased military spending as US support for Ukraine falters. Dominant US tech services may be the next focus.
There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the Internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.
“There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could be weaponized against European interests,” says Marietje Schaake, a nonresident fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a former decadelong member of the European Parliament.
Really? I thought that’s where big cloud services fleece customers the hardest… We use AWS at work, and I’m always surprised when I ask our devOPs how much we’re paying.
My understanding is they’re selling the “time is money” angle, where things work together well so you spend less time getting stuff set up.
Yes, that is why I said enterprise scale. Pricing for personal stuff is pretty terrible, although it is reasonable in some ways.
I find AWS prices to be very reasonable, but it is much different than going race to the bottom deal hunting on hetzner. That’s definitely where you want to go deal hunting, but it isn’t suitable for a lot of enterprise applications.
With the bigger CSPs, you really have to take care of the billing yourself to get the best value. Last year, my team was able to cut our client’s cloud bill by 85% while improving service. Kind of unfair - AWS will happily take your money to do stuff incorrectly. They have business units at AWS around customer success that aims to help cut costs, but I can kind of tell they aren’t a priority at the company compared to account execs. Pretty normal for this business, unfortunately.
We use AWS at work, and the “cutting costs” thing seems largely a way to further lock-in customers. They want you to build around their tools so the switching cost is high enough to not be worthwhile. Then again, I don’t work directly with billing (I’m a SWE, not in OPs), but what I’ve seen looks a lot higher than I would’ve guessed.
Idk, maybe it’s reasonable at scale, but it seems to get really expensive really fast.