Experience report: Obstacle course when migrating from Amazon AWS to EU cloud

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Developer Robert Heide founded a European auto parts trading platform. He no longer wanted to operate it with the US hyperscaler Amazon AWS, but with EU providers. He explains in a blog post what unforeseen problems had to be solved during the migration.

Feasible, but harder than expected

In the blog of his consulting firm Coinerella.com, Heide first explains the reasons why he wants to host the trading platform hank.parts with EU providers in the first place: data sovereignty, independence from US companies, easier fulfillment of GDPR requirements. But he also wanted to prove that it was possible.

Heide then explains which providers he selected, including Hetzner, Scaleway, Bunny.net, and Hanko. It became more difficult with the infrastructure he uses to operate Kubernetes, namely via Rancher. For this, in turn, he uses Gitea, Plausible, Twenty CRM, Infisical, and Bugsink.

In addition, Tutanota and UptimeRobot are included.

Cheaper than AWS

According to Heide, Hetzner sells the basic services compute, mass storage (S3-compatible object storage), and load balancing significantly cheaper than AWS.

He uses Scaleway for, among other things, Transactional E-Mail (TEM), Container Registry, the Observability Stack, and the Domain Registrar.

From Slovenian Bunny.net comes CDN with distributed storage, DNS, and protection functions such as WAF and DDoS Protection. Nebius handles AI inference, and Hanko handles authentication and identity management.

Difficult areas

The first surprising difficulties, according to the blog post, arose when setting up an email service with reasonable prices but also the desired range of functions. It is not easy to discover the services offered in the EU and their exact prices. Scaleway TEM runs well, but the ecosystem is smaller, for example, there are fewer templates.

The developer found it particularly difficult to say goodbye to the familiar GitHub. While Gitea works very well, it requires getting used to it.

It is annoying that the registration for some top-level domains (TLDs) is significantly more expensive through European providers than elsewhere.

Unsolvable problems

The developer also describes services that simply do not exist in the EU. Without Google and Apple, there are no smartphone apps for Android and iOS, and no advertising with Google Ads. Moreover, his customers expect convenience features such as "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Apple." The OAuth workflow via Hanko would also have to involve US providers in this case.

Finally, some attractive AI services are simply not offered in Europe yet; he names Anthropic Claude as an example.

(ciw)