Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play
- Reference: 1771596368
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/02/20/ditching_aws_euro_stack/
- Source link:
That's the takeaway from [1]a blog post published on Friday in which one founder lays out what happened when they decided to ditch the US hyperscalers and piece together a "Made in EU" stack instead.
Microsoft throws spox under the bus after Parliament testimony on ICC email kerfuffle [2]READ MORE
The experiment eventually turned into [3]hank.parts , a cross-border car parts marketplace where buyers post what they need and sellers from around Europe pitch offers.
The motivation won't surprise anyone who's followed the sovereignty debate: keep data in Europe, avoid putting everything in the hands of a few US cloud giants, and see if a homegrown stack can actually hold up. Turns out it can – just with a few more hurdles along the way.
Compute ended up running on Hetzner, with Scaleway filling in gaps like email and container registries. Bunny.net handled CDN and edge duties, Nebius provided GPU capacity for AI inference, and German identity outfit Hanko took care of authentication. A long tail of tools – analytics, secrets management, CRM, error tracking – was self-hosted on Kubernetes, with Rancher acting as the control tower.
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"Is self-hosting more work than SaaS? Obviously. But it means my data stays exactly where I put it, and I'm not at the mercy of a provider's pricing changes or acquisition drama," the founder said.
[5]
[6]
The trade-off is that every self-hosted component becomes your responsibility when something breaks, and the documentation rabbit hole can get pretty deep at the worst possible moment.
What really stands out in the post isn't the infrastructure choices so much as the ecosystem's pull.
[7]Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
[8]France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative
[9]Europe shrugs off tariffs, plots to end tech reliance on US
[10]AWS flips switch on Euro cloud as customers fret about digital sovereignty
"If you live in GitHub's ecosystem Actions, Issues, code review workflows, the social graph... walking away feels like leaving a city you've lived in for a decade," they wrote. "You know where everything is. Gitea is actually excellent, and I'd recommend it without hesitation for the core git experience. But you'll miss the ecosystem."
Not everything can be local, though. Getting an app onto phones still means handing a cut to Apple and Google, and finding users still tends to run through Google Ads. Social logins also keep bouncing through US systems because that's what people expect. And if you want the newest AI models, you're still making a call across the Atlantic.
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It doesn't come across as a warning so much as a reminder of where things stand. Europe's cloud scene is clearly capable, but going all-in today still means a bit more hands-on work and fewer shortcuts. You get more control and often lower bills, but with a little less of the "it just works" magic.
Europe can run your stack perfectly well. It just hasn't quite figured out how to make it the default path yet. ®
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[1] https://www.coinerella.com/made-in-eu-it-was-harder-than-i-thought/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/18/microsoft_asks_uk_parliament_to_correct_record/
[3] https://hank.parts/en/home
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aZiTNTZQTyVFmzUcgkxWMQAAAw4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aZiTNTZQTyVFmzUcgkxWMQAAAw4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aZiTNTZQTyVFmzUcgkxWMQAAAw4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/30/euro_firms_must_ditch_us/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/27/france_videoconferencing_visio/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/03/europe_tariffs_forrester/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/15/aws_european_sovereign_cloud/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aZiTNTZQTyVFmzUcgkxWMQAAAw4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
VPS
Why not a single VPS server which handles everything? You can install a web server, email server, application server and database server on the same box. It just depends on how many users you need to handle. And you can dial up the memory and CPU power accordingly. There's no real need for all these different external providers. You just need to make sure your VPS provider isn't American-owned.
Exfiltrate data to an offline backup location once a month or so just to be on the safe side since the VPS provider backups the entire server filesystem on a daily basis.
Re: VPS
Because that's neither scalable nor resilient. For any reasonably large service you will have to load balance at some point, you'll have to reach decisions about databases (where to put writes, can you use replicas for reading etc.), add some caching (they mention a CDN) and so on.
A single server can't withstand even the simplest of error conditions such as "a node is rebooting". That's probably also why they have Kubernetes in there, if your application is sufficiently stateless you won't even notice node reboots or outages that way.
'Europe' is not a sovereign entity.
Neither is the EU.
When push comes to shove and the nationalists start to win more elections, EU member states will increasingly fall out.
Still, avoiding SaaS, AI and the cloud is a sensible infosec policy regardless of geopolitics, Trumpistan and the like.
Good for him but if he'd tried to do this before AI, LLMs etc. would he have found it impossible to build such a site? If not why is this waste of silicon and energy being rolled into it?
Alternative to GitHub
How about Codeberg ?
Codeberg covers most core GitHub functionality (repos, issues, wikis, CI, Pages) but has a smaller ecosystem, stricter FOSS focus, and resource limits, with a stronger privacy/ethical stance.
codeberg.org
Re: Alternative to GitHub
It says why on their front page "Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects" I rather doubt hank.parts plans on being open source
Re: Alternative to GitHub
Agree. Are we talking about just git hosting for fun and no-profit?
Or about finding a non-US ecosystem that can host governments and/or a CannesFlix ( NetFlix famously uses/used AWS)?
i.e. the usual geekery or actual business? Europe is not lacking - and thats a GOOD THING - in FOSS street cred.
Re: Alternative to GitHub
They mention Gitea which they're probably hosting themselves. They could do the same with Forgejo, which is what Codeberg uses.
Migrating cloud apps is more than location
The article misses a really important point. Moving hosts is only a part of the challenge. Most cloud native apps are integrated with AWS/Azure/gCloud at the API level, not just where the processes run. This is a vastly more complex migration challenge and simply popping up a k8s pod with minikube on a Hetzner host in Finland!
We need to change the vocabulary
Instead of referring to AWS and the like as 'US cloud giants', we need to refer to them as 'US Trojan horses'.
Hammer home that the USA has access to Europe's confidential and secret information. Not just on people, but all the trade information that the USA exploits. Why would Europe put its trade in the hands of a regime led by an Orange convicted felon sex abuser, which is currently inflicting trade harm with tariffs? See the USA regime as the ogre it is.
With a proper impetus that ANY access to Europe's data is a security threat we might get somewhere.