The European Cloud Computing Renaissance
The decay
The reigning years are behind. A society that takes for granted the welfare state tends to slow down, sit back and get comfortable. In the meantime, US and China went full throttle on technological innovation relegating the Europeans to the sidelines.
Today, around 70% of the cloud computing market is shared by the US hyperscalers: Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), and Google (GCP). European cloud providers' market share dropped from 29% in 2017 to 15% in 2022; halved their share in 5 years. No surprise when the US players were investing $10 billion every quarter in European capex. It created a real technical gap positioning the US services as the default option for both companies and professionals.
They created a movement with community-driven certification trainings, user groups, workshops, and evangelists around the world advertising for free. They released dozens of managed services per year, basically every open-source project with high adoption was wrapped and offered as an out-of-the-box, ready-to-use tool — it just works.
They succeeded in creating such a robust and complete ecosystem, setting most of the current standards in the industry. The mere idea of migrating away from it unsettles many. What companies don't easily realize is that they might not even need such robustness and complexity; overengineering locks companies into them.
In recent years, geopolitical tensions raised concerns within EU state members resulting in prioritizing the sovereignty conversation, reignited the Made in Europe spirit, and led the EU to fund initiatives to take back control and minimize foreign dependencies. A wake-up call, you could say...
The Renaissance
Not everything is negative; the larger European providers, Scaleway, OVHCloud, UpCloud, Hetzner, among others have stealthily done an amazing job catching up with the US adding more managed services and mimicking their playbook.
We are living the wake-up call. We are an engineering team with a purpose.
We will make the European cloud computing ecosystem whole.
We are reimagining the cloud management experience. This journey cannot follow replication and mimicry. We will collaborate with major European cloud and infrastructure providers to integrate better and offer a distinct experience founded on simplicity and efficiency.
Multi-cloud environments enable innovation, efficiency, and flexibility.
- AI accelerates innovation and broadens the spectrum of areas where ideas land. Relying on multiple cloud providers' capabilities encourages teams to walk unexplored paths.
- Flexibility gains relevance in times of compute and resource scarcity; it lets teams leverage multiple providers' capacity.
- Cost efficiency is achieved by implementing smart placement supported by customized trade-offs.
Creating a collective to achieve greatness is imperative in today's standing. Building on the strengths of each is crucial for competitiveness.
Closing the technological gap
The only way to close the gap is by doing what we know best...BUILD!
Starting with:
- Build the missing layer on top of the European cloud providers. We will choose the best service of each to meet the actual companies' needs. The customer sees one platform.
- Build the missing critical tools to boost the European cloud computing ecosystem's readiness to take back control and cut foreign dependencies.
- Build AI agents inside the platform to speed up troubleshooting, improve incident detection and prevention, and reduce cost by right-sizing infrastructure.
It's a lot of work. Ambitious. Bold. Probably the reason why it hasn't been done yet. And the same reason why we're thrilled to embark on this endeavor.
Let's BUILD!
If this is your fight too, say so. We haven't launched — this is the design-partner phase, and what you tell us decides what gets built and in which order. Disagreement is worth more to us than applause. Write to info@unhazzle.io.