Airbus Takes Flight from AWS(theregister.com) |
Airbus Takes Flight from AWS(theregister.com) |
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.
To be fair, it was always obvious to anyone with half a brain that "European region" from a US provider was fake-EU.
The problem is that PARIOT act, CLOUD act and everything else has gone from being a paper tiger to real and present danger. No longer a theoretical risk.
So even people willing to previously turn a blind eye to the crystal clear risks can no longer do so.
It is also no longer possible to trust those tasked with implementing it not to bow to political pressures.
A long time ago now, Microsoft (Azure) put up a fight when the US came calling for some data hosted in their "EU (Ireland) region". I think there is zero chance of them putting up a fight today if Donny boy picked up the phone to Satya .
And that's before we get to the example of a Texas court ordering Verisign to cut off the .com domain from a Dutch company.[1]
Sadly I have limited sympathy for a country that having witnessed Donny's first term thought "you know what, we'll have more of that" and voted accordingly.
[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-...
For 2.5 more years.
That would not be a big problem. But the next Republican president may be even worse than Trump. Trump is just the symptom of a deeper corruption problem.
That things will fix themselves when Trump is not in the White House anymore is a dangerous misconception.
1) it’s fairly unlikely that they give up on more powers voluntarily (exactly how much of the patriot act and the post-9/11 rules were given up by Obama and Biden?)
2) there is always the possibility of a future switch to another populist nutcase (or hell, any nutcase really). We are not going to trust American voters to be sensible anymore. We’ll need a couple of sane administrations and long-term polling data for that.
Who is going to trust US voters with not voting for a man-child?
Remember: Trump got in twice.
For one, they are deeply in bed with the current administration (for any definition of current, past, and future).
For another, they fight tooth and nail any and all sovereignity of data even within their own walled gardens. See decade of battles by Google, Apple, Facebook etc. in the EU.
US tech bros got a front-row seat, sitting in front of Cabinet picks, at the inauguration:
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgpqeq82rvo
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/20/trump-inaugu...
Why did Airbus go to "the cloud" in the first place? It seems complete overkill for a company like that.
https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/07/16/airbus-...
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.
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.
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
Guess where I'm going to recommend spending our money?
Wow.
> Skywise, a platform that aggregates and analyzes aviation data, and Case Management Assistant for customers' technical queries will continue to be hosted by AWS.
--
0: https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/07/16/airbus-migrating-70-critical-apps-from-aws-to-frances-scaleway-amid-digital-sovereignty-push/5272373edit: who am I telling this ;)
[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.
Also, there’s no budget for training any more.
Now they still have to pay for the same senior sysadmins they were told they wouldn't need anymore, but, with the added bonus of paying 10-1000x for bandwidth over what they could get if they had stayed on-prem.
Note: I mean the Google Docs and Microsoft 365 type of cloud not the AWS and Azure type of cloud
With a cloud provider, you can get an account by filling out a sign-up page and handing over a credit card. Internal teams will often hide behind Bureaucracy and a ticket system, with processes that make hosting a simple web app take multiple quarters.
Now there are layered reasons for that, some of them with legitimate basis, but at the end of the day they're usually low skilled teams click-ops-ing some VMWware, delivering a terrible service.
The same reason that so many companies went to "the cloud", because the hyperscalers warpped the C-suite round their little finger.
There are two things any C-suite like doing that the hyperscalers could help them tick boxes on.
First, shifting capex to opex. They love doing that because of the accounting treatment. Opex goes into your P&L, so it reduces your taxable profit and therefore it reduces your tax bill. Meanwhile capex goes onto the balance sheet and is deprecated over the asset's life, so the "only" benefit you might get is to claim allowances (e.g. R&D) from your tax authority.
Second, it allows lots of things to be made "someone else's problem". Security ? Their problem. Staff ? Their problem. Tick-boxes to keep the compliance department happy ? Their problem.
So the hyperscalers can turn up and spin a ready-made story that the C-suite will lap up. Perhaps accompanied by a nice lunch and a round of golf. ;)
There is no doubt, companies such as Airbus have the technical competence and the financial means to do it all in-house. Sadly the C-suite calls the shots ....
Whatever email provider they use, people will always be the ultimate vector, clicking links they shouldn't.
Microsoft moved late with Azure, but as they had so many customers in B2B already with SQL Server and Office, that they soon grew market share. Google Cloud followed and acquired companies like Firebase to differentiate.
Market Share 2026
AWS 28%
Azure 21%
Google 14%
Move to AWS? All techies want to add that to their CV so sure why not... Who cares if it's the best decision as long as the CVs get improved.
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[1] My personal bugbear are techies who are adamant that nothing but google chrome can be used by the regardless of the fact that when pressed they can't find a single site that doesn't work on FF. Usually the goalposts are moved at some point in the discussion from "sites don't work on FF" to performance even though FF with uBlock origin cuts actual downloading of ads to zero compared to the uBlock lite on chrome. They'll next complain about memory used in FF compared to google regardless of the lack of any measurements and even though these same techies are using bloated electron apps daily anyway!
As you can tell, this really is a personal bugbear of mine.
AWS was also cheaper in the beginning but has been slowly ratcheting up the pricing making colocation or on-premise viable again for some workloads which have steady compute demands.
For the first (cloud vs. non-cloud) it's clear that cloud has some advantages because you don't have to manage hardware.
For the second (AWS vs. other-cloud), at least in my experience, AWS is simply the best experience available. If anything the other cloud providers go out of their way to offer special deals and cozy customer relationships to try to get customers to switch, but AWS is still the gold standard in availability and uptime and ease of use.
The gap is narrowing as the field becomes more commoditized though. And I think that's what we're really seeing here. As things like k8s get more common, solutions are becoming more and more substrate-independent, so companies hunt for smaller, more local, cheaper, ambitious alternatives. Everyone is scared of vendor lock-in so it's getting harder for cloud providers to offer distinguishing features.
We all just forgot you can rent a server huh
I really like AWS. But I feel like there is a lot of money to be made in consultants overselling services built on it. And a lot of traditionally expensive IT teams are being replaced with even more expensive cloud "architects".
We're small (< 25 people). We maintained a single rack in a colo, and all the servers were showing their age. We weighed lease cost for replacement (along with hassle of actually doing it), and migrated into AWS last January.
It's been ... messy. I'm not certain we'll stay. It's easier in the sense that we can bring up arbitrarily many new machines without needing to call Dell when a host gets full, but it's definitely not cheaper. And weirdball AWS-only things get in the way. Oh, and literally nothing is simple or easy in administration or setup.
If I had it to do over again, I think I'd have bitten the bullet and leased more boxes instead.
They’re not idiots. A lot of thought went into it, and the idea it’s all just incompetent BS dreamt up on a golf course is madness.
I agree if we are operating a cat meme distribution business that AWS starts to look a bit overkill. Something like a banking consultancy is a different matter. Good luck passing due diligence as a bank's vendor when you are also physically responsible for the machines. You can do this, but it sucks and it's your entire job + overtime + on call.
AWS has a dedicated feature (artifact) that can serve as the foundation of your compliance package. If you are racking your own machines you get to start with a blank pile of forms.
I think it's the other way around. At the extreme scales you don't want AWS.
If you're running a cat meme distribution business, a single senior skilled techie will cheaply get you set up on a VPS (or a bunch of them) with the services you need.
If you're a bank, you have all the budget in-house to babysit your own VPS and stand up your own equivalents to whatever the fuck it is you were using on AWS, and follow all regulations. Because, face it, as a bank, the type of regulations you meet by using AWS is a tiny fraction of all the regulations you have to follow, so there is literally a team within the bank tasked purely with making sure all banking regulations are followed, and that team exists even if you're on AWS for everything.
The only place AWS makes sense is if you're a company with no technical department in the first place.
This is not comparable to the situation in a company like Airbus, with perhaps 10k people of every imaginable expertise employed in just the IT department. Not comparable to most companies that are 1/50th of Airbus size either.
For a largish company (1000+ people, 500M+ turnover), assigning ten FTE:s to managing the racks and general core infra on a 365/24 basis and another five lawyers and general bureaucrats to deal with the general paperwork is nothing.
The reason for the big cloud shift in the 2010s was other things. A lot of hype/lies about how fast, cheap and easy things would be. And in many companies probably also a feeling that internal IT were a bunch of morons who failed at anything you asked them to do, and that anything else must be better.
It's expensive, but you get what you pay for.
It seems to me more like smart business tact, figuring out early on whether your infrastructure provider will be easy to work with or a bureaucratic pain in the ass
I entirely exclude Digital Ocean from competent suppliers.
Thank you! Say this louder for all the people saying VPN providers shouldn't have your government issued ID on file to use them.
As you point out, Mullvad VPN and the like are NOT competent suppliers and should NOT be trusted, as you correctly point out.
I’m amazed that it is even legal for businesses to ask for that at all, outside of a few exceptional cases of which “I want to rent a server” most certainly isn’t one.
No sure if requiring a ID upfront is the perfect solution (if i recall, i never had to provide a ID on my private or business Hetzner accounts) but it isn't just there to annoy you.
If you still think your Hetzner registration process is convoluted, try getting a license for IDA Pro.
You'll love the experience, I promise.
!/s
[0] https://historicalarchives.europarl.europa.eu/files/live/sit...
The political unreliability alone is enough. Just takes one orange guy waking up in a foul mood one day and doing something erratic. That increases risk for using anything American across the board even if the individual companies have done nothing wrong
I think that's a thinly veiled excuse for a much more mundane reason this is happening; their government stakeholders asked them to find a way to retaliate as part of the arguments around trade going on, and Airbus figured this out as a lever they could pull without angering any airline customers.
> Spying on allies for economic advantage is a crucial new assignment for the C.I.A. now that American foreign policy is focused on commercial interests abroad. President Clinton made economic intelligence a high priority of his Administration, specifically information to protect and defend American competitiveness, technology and financial security in a world where an economic crisis can spread across global markets in minutes
At the time "only" to have the upper hand in trade negotiations, and presumably when "having the President press foreign countries to award business to American firms", as they call it. But that was 30 years ago, and trust that these these things aren't directly forwarded to US private industry is in short supply these days
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/15/world/emerging-role-for-t...
https://archive.is/LmEA1 (same site without paywall)
The fact that, AFAIK, that's never happened nor been alleged says a lot.
Why We Spy on Our Allies
March 17, 2000 11:56 am ET
By R. James Woolsey, a Washington lawyer and a former director of central intelligence.
We'll begin with some candor from the American side. Yes, my continental European friends, we have spied on you. And it's true that we use computers to sort through data by using keywords. Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we're looking for?
tl;dr: "You bribe, so we spy"
> Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we're looking for?
Any advantage that they can exploit. It's no great secret that the US government often acts on behalf of its major corporations and vice versa.
TIL that when Greece tested four tanks in 2000 before a big arms purchase, the US M1A1 Abrams and British Challenger 2E tanks had trouble with their satellite navigation systems. A French intelligence agency used GPS jammers to help the French Leclerc tank in the competition. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6bhr14/til_th...>
Without a GPU ban, then the PRC will accelerate domestic AI/LLM R&D and deployment, while still funding indigenous AI chip development efforts.
------
From afar it makes America look so insecure and almost pathetic: China's R&D ecosystem is a huge mass with a lot of inertia - trade policy and embargos will be about as effective against it as the paper they're printed on.
The Trump administration is a shot across the bows for Europeans, undoubtedly.
But do they have to up their defence spending a bit, engage in some tough talk, reduce their dependence on imported energy, and gift Trump some gold-plated furniture?
Or do they have to do that and eliminate their dependence on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Intel, AMD, nvidia, Apple, Mastercard, Visa, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, Facebook, Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Juniper, Cisco, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Adobe and Uber?
Because the latter won't happen spontaneously, it'll need deliberate, decisive leadership. And Trump will be out of office long before it's done.
Some of those are not like the others. Some are B2C and will face (indeed, are facing), tougher regulations. Some are B2B or B2G and there are already companies squaring up to take some of that pie. Many are ultimately reliant on ASML tech which I think Europe is prepared to weaponise in a trade war if they need to.
And yes, it'll take leadership, and constitution of the United States, or constitution of the physical body: one of them is taking that man out of the White House in the next 10, 20 or however many years.
But the tone has been set. Trust takes years to build and seconds to destroy. The direction of travel has been created, and while it might take a generation to get to an end goal, the process has started already.
Then having a digital services tax starts looking like free money with few downsides to the EU. And the defence spending increases funding requirements.
The dependence would be eliminated by taxing it away.
My fear is with these types of issues of sovereignty (or corruption), the reaction is often right-wing or left-wing populism. The type of thing that got Trump there in the first place.
Internal hosting teams ( cloud or on-prem ) should work more like public hosting environments and should focus on:
- Segregating workloads. If amazon can host a hacked service on their hosting stack without every tenant immediately being compromised, you can too.
- Self-Service. Teams should be able to just get accounts and do stuff without asking anyone.
- Building assurance. Now you've made it easy for teams to do small things, you're more likely to get more users and have less shadow-IT. You can now try and build organizational assurance without making teams suffer.
A team just needs petty cash and a cost code for a small amount of space in dev land.
What everyone does instead if ask for the planning to be done and completed upfront, which isn't realistic for a team you just stood up trying to do UR and a POC.
I agree with you, we went from terrible service, to terrible service with no leverage.
"The systems are down, it's a global Microsoft Cloud issue affecting everyone"
vs
"The systems are down, Bob from my team made an error but we are working to fix it"The same people who were logging into AWS and managing stuff there.
Also Hetzner really doesn't care much about individuals as far as I know, they mostly do business with other businesses and that's where the money is, their business is not designed to handle millions of individual users, DigitalOcean might also simply have a different strategy there.
They're also a bit picky with who they allow to sign up and they discriminate by country of origin. I had no problem being from a first world country with a passport, but I've heard the horror stories. If you're from Asia or Africa you may have an issue - if you have a registered business (even a sole tradership) in Europe, that would probably help convince them.
Companies usually know how to handle customers
(Yes some do want to verify the customer for every single purchase - but I usually skip those)
Even more mundane reason would be the USA threatening war.
If the US decided to sanction Airbus, decent odds that the EU would make it illegal for EU businesses to comply with those US sanctions.
Similar to how the US has made it illegal for US firms to comply with Arab League sanctions against Israel
Among the allegations: that the NSA fed information to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas enabling the companies to beat out European Airbus Industrie for a $ 6 billion contract; and that Raytheon received information that helped it win a $ 1.3 billion contract to provide radar to Brazil, edging out the French company Thomson-CSF. These claims follow previous allegations that the NSA supplied U.S. automakers with information that helped improve their competitiveness with the Japanese (see "Company Spies," May/June 1994).
How about the case of “I want to rent a server to distribute illicit and or dangerous materials and then it’s your problem”?
> How about the case of “I want to rent a server to distribute illicit and or dangerous materials and then it’s your problem”?
And are we going to use "because terrorism" card on HN?
Like it or not, banks are legally mandated to do KYC, and this is essentially the same, except for information or communication being “moved” instead of money.