In other news, wolves have set up a vegan restaurant for sheep. The chefs have been specially instructed not to eat their guests, the grass is 100% organic. Mint sauce is kept well out of sight. The heavy duty locks on the doors will definitely not be used and the red stains are from beetroot. Definitely beetroot.
Seriously though, what is stopping Europeans to "just build their own"? EU could provide some form of financing - cheap loans, tax breaks, favourable regulation etc. I know AWS is a million things, not just VMs, but is building a small cloud provider and scaling from there really that hard? Maybe I'm being super naive - ELI5 please?
There are some EU cloud providers that try (OVH, Scaleway, Hetzner, Upcloud, Evroc), but AWS is a product 20+ years in the making and only in the last 5 that people are really opening their eyes to the sovereignty problem. And even if those providers did have the money and regulation breaks AWS had, today is a much different market than the one AWS grew up with, in which there wasn’t an incumbent and they were leading the market. Nowadays everyone has to be at least similar to AWS for people to consider it, and I feel sovereignty alone is not enough.
In other words: making a cloud provider isn’t that difficult, making a cloud provider that people will use INSTEAD OF AWS is an exponentially harder problem.
Seriously though, what is stopping Europeans to "just build their own"? EU could provide some form of financing - cheap loans, tax breaks, favourable regulation etc. I know AWS is a million things, not just VMs, but is building a small cloud provider and scaling from there really that hard? Maybe I'm being super naive - ELI5 please?