I signed up my business with Hetzner. And the first thing I saw during onboarding was a demand to upload my ID to spend $5 to test their service (I was testing before we bought). I wrote to customer service and got,
Dear Client,
We received your email. Thanks for writing to us.
You have probably realized that this is an automated message.
We need some time to process each email that we receive, but we will write back to you personally as soon as we can.
Kind regards
Hetzner Online GmbH
[...]
www.hetzner.com
Digital Ocean? They just let me do it.
Guess where I'm going to recommend spending our money?
>Airbus isn't ditching Microsoft any time soon because there's nowhere to go. Likewise Google productivity apps because the only place to go is Microsoft.
[x] doubt
There a perfectly suitable office and productivity suites, but if your requirement is that every obscure feature from a .doc file created in 2003 needs to work... well then yes, you only have one provider to choose from.
More adequate question would be why did Airbus go GCP instead of pushing a local french actor like OVH, Clever or Scale, decison that seemed right all along and that is eventually in place ? The answer is because of the bribe ex-CEO took !
And about espionage there's not much to spy on : no new plane ongoing, no fancy tech detained by Airbus, all the tech is the suppliers, Airbus is only an assembler. To prove my point see chinese aviation : it's been 20years we litteraly gave them the A320 and they are still far from producing anything of their own, they barely managed to have that copy called Comac flying !
I don't fully understand why companies use AWS. Is it a management driven or engineering driven decision? I assume management - in big companies some exec from Amazon comes to play golf, and in small companies the managers copy what the big companies are doing?
US tech does not understand or comprehend the amount of damage they’ve self inflicted in the last couple of years. There will be a steady drip of this in years to come, I suspect.
Vendor lock-in has always been a concern, but AI workloads make the conversation even more important. Designing portable architectures from day one is becoming a competitive advantage.
So after the 2008 spying scandal (cia got caught using German intelligence bases to steal airbus designs), Airbus ran it's critical applications ... on AWS?
What doesn't get talked about in these articles is the increasing impact to small business in the US.
I run a small business (scanii.com) and I've noticed over the past year an increasing number of customers leaving us to European competitors, customers that have been happy with us for years, using our European region, but now have concerns over US foreign policy and are giving preferred treatment to EU suppliers. When I asked they said, I'm paraphrasing here, "happy with the product but management wants EU supplier".
What this means in practical terms is that, if the tide doesn't change, US entrepreneurs will have a potential buyer population that is roughly cut in half if they can only sell to US buyers. This will have a cascading negative effect in the number of startups that succeed - impossible to quantify at this point.
Large corps can skirt around this issue by establishing an EU entity and trying to buy goodwill that way but that's not an option easily available to small businesses.
Jane Street recently posted a video of their datacenter warehouse in USA on YouTube
Most of this large building was empty... they said that as compute had become dense along with advancements in liquid cooling, the same amount of power x years ago now only required few racks.
No need for many companies to go on cloud, at a minimum should be hybrid on prem.
I think a lot of commenters here are missing the ball with the idea that this is a foreign policy or anti-US sentiment emerging.
The core reality is that cloud infrastructure is becoming commoditized, and substrate-independence is becoming not only possible but the default. So companies looking for things like lower cost or better customer support are looking around and seeing that smaller rising competitors are going to be a better option. Compliance with local regulatory regimes are going to be a factor as the EU continues its efforts to push European companies towards using EU infrastructure.
22 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 12.4 ms ] threadI signed up my business with Hetzner. And the first thing I saw during onboarding was a demand to upload my ID to spend $5 to test their service (I was testing before we bought). I wrote to customer service and got,
Digital Ocean? They just let me do it.Guess where I'm going to recommend spending our money?
[x] doubt
There a perfectly suitable office and productivity suites, but if your requirement is that every obscure feature from a .doc file created in 2003 needs to work... well then yes, you only have one provider to choose from.
Why did Airbus go to "the cloud" in the first place? It seems complete overkill for a company like that.
And about espionage there's not much to spy on : no new plane ongoing, no fancy tech detained by Airbus, all the tech is the suppliers, Airbus is only an assembler. To prove my point see chinese aviation : it's been 20years we litteraly gave them the A320 and they are still far from producing anything of their own, they barely managed to have that copy called Comac flying !
Then it got not only complicated but complex, and full of vendor lock in.
It used to be easy to orchestrate, there were terraform modules for everything. I chose it multiple times for that exact reason.
The cost structure used to also be good, you knew how much your bill was gonna be, you could get cheaper pricing if you went for spot instances etc.
Wow.
I run a small business (scanii.com) and I've noticed over the past year an increasing number of customers leaving us to European competitors, customers that have been happy with us for years, using our European region, but now have concerns over US foreign policy and are giving preferred treatment to EU suppliers. When I asked they said, I'm paraphrasing here, "happy with the product but management wants EU supplier".
What this means in practical terms is that, if the tide doesn't change, US entrepreneurs will have a potential buyer population that is roughly cut in half if they can only sell to US buyers. This will have a cascading negative effect in the number of startups that succeed - impossible to quantify at this point.
Large corps can skirt around this issue by establishing an EU entity and trying to buy goodwill that way but that's not an option easily available to small businesses.
I fear rough waters ahead.
Most of this large building was empty... they said that as compute had become dense along with advancements in liquid cooling, the same amount of power x years ago now only required few racks.
No need for many companies to go on cloud, at a minimum should be hybrid on prem.
https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/07/16/airbus-...
The core reality is that cloud infrastructure is becoming commoditized, and substrate-independence is becoming not only possible but the default. So companies looking for things like lower cost or better customer support are looking around and seeing that smaller rising competitors are going to be a better option. Compliance with local regulatory regimes are going to be a factor as the EU continues its efforts to push European companies towards using EU infrastructure.