Best practices for evaluating European alternatives to AWS, Azure and GCP

Someone asked you to evaluate EU cloud alternatives. Here's how not to waste three sprints on it

Your DPO, a customer, or procurement just asked whether you could run on European infrastructure instead of AWS, Azure or GCP. This isn't about picking a side in the sovereignty debate; it's about giving a straight technical answer. What actually breaks if you move, what's portable, and what needs real validation before anyone signs off.

This comes from running the same evaluation repeatedly for SaaS teams, agencies and e-commerce platforms going through procurement cycles or security questionnaires. None of it requires ditching Kubernetes, Terraform or your CI/CD setup.

Problem 1: "EU region" and "EU jurisdiction" get treated as the same thing

They're not. AWS, Azure and GCP all run EU data center regions, but the parent company is still bound by US law, CLOUD Act included, no matter where the bytes sit. If the actual requirement is jurisdictional separation, flipping a region dropdown on a hyperscaler doesn't solve it.

Fix: write this distinction into your evaluation criteria before comparing a single vendor. Otherwise you'll spend weeks comparing the wrong thing.

Problem 2: you're comparing brands instead of primitives

Most SaaS stacks need the same handful of things: compute, object storage, managed Postgres or MySQL, a load balancer, a CDN. List what you actually use, by capability, not by AWS product name.

# Example: workload inventory before evaluation
compute: 12 vCPU, autoscaling 2-8 nodes
object_storage: S3-compatible, 4TB, lifecycle rules
database: managed PostgreSQL 15, 200GB, daily PITR
cdn: edge caching, EU + UK pop coverage
queue: managed Redis, 2GB, persistence enabled

This turns a vague "can we replace AWS" into an answerable question: which EU providers offer S3-compatible storage, managed Postgres with PITR, and a comparable autoscaling setup.

Problem 3: assuming object storage means a rewrite

It usually doesn't. OVHcloud, Scaleway, Exoscale and Hetzner (via third-party gateways) all expose S3-compatible APIs. If your app talks to S3 through the standard SDK, repointing the endpoint and credentials is often enough.

aws s3 cp test.txt s3://my-bucket/test.txt \
  --endpoint-url https://s3.de.io.cloud.ovh.net \
  --profile eu-provider

Run this smoke test before you plan anything bigger.

Problem 4: the database layer is where things actually go wrong

Compute and object storage are portable. Managed databases are not, this is where EU providers diverge most: feature parity, replication tooling, backup retention defaults. Before committing to anything, run a full backup/restore cycle on the target provider and measure recovery time for real.

Problem 5: latency assumptions based on a data center brochure

Frankfurt or Amsterdam will serve EU traffic fine. If 20% of your users are in the UK, US or APAC, that's a different story. Run synthetic tests from multiple regions with mtr or a distributed probe service, and look at p50/p95, not averages.

Problem 6: CDN "EU" claims that don't match actual routing

Some EU-headquartered CDN resellers still route certain regions through non-EU origin infrastructure. If sovereignty is a real requirement, get a documented PoP list and trace actual request paths yourself:

curl -w "@curl-format.txt" -o /dev/null -s https://your-cdn-endpoint.com

Or a plain traceroute from your target markets.

Problem 7: certifications that apply to the reseller, not the facility

Ask for the ISO 27001 (and NEN 7510 where relevant) of the physical data center, not the managed service layered on top. A logo on a website isn't a certificate. Request the actual scope statement.

Problem 8: pricing only the compute line

European providers often look cheaper per vCPU hour, until you add egress, backup storage, IP allocation and support tiers. Build a like-for-like monthly cost model across at least three providers using your real usage pattern, not a generic instance size.

Problem 9: IaC that was never tested against the new provider

If your Terraform targets AWS-specific resources, you usually need a provider swap, not a rewrite, for standard compute and networking. Run terraform plan against a sandbox account early.

provider "openstack" {
  auth_url    = var.ovh_auth_url
  domain_name = "default"
  tenant_name = var.ovh_project_id
}

resource "openstack_compute_instance_v2" "app" {
  name            = "app-node-1"
  flavor_name     = "b2-15"
  image_name      = "Ubuntu 22.04"
  security_groups = ["default"]
}

This catches unsupported resource types (certain autoscaling policies, specific VPC peering models) before they block you mid-migration.

Problem 10: treating the cutover as a single switch

Run both environments in parallel with DNS-weighted traffic splitting. Validate error rates and latency at each traffic percentage. Keep the old environment warm through at least one full peak traffic cycle. This is standard practice for any zero-downtime migration, and it's what keeps a sovereignty decision from turning into an outage.

How to actually roll this out

Don't try to do all ten in one sprint.

• Phase 1 (1-2 weeks): workload inventory and requirement separation. Pure documentation, gives procurement or legal something concrete to work with.
• Phase 2 (2-4 weeks): sandbox validation against at least two candidate providers. Runs in parallel with production, costs a few hundred euros in test resources, produces real numbers instead of vendor claims.
• Phase 3 (4-10 weeks): staged migration with IaC parity testing and a reversible cutover. Keep a rollback window of at least one full business cycle before decommissioning anything.

Assign one engineer as technical owner from day one. Splitting this across the team produces benchmarks that don't line up later.

None of this requires faith. It requires inventory, benchmarking and a staged rollout, the same discipline you'd apply to any infrastructure change.

Full version with more context here: Best practices for evaluating European alternatives to AWS, Azure and GCP

Originally published on binadit.com