Introducing the EuroStack initiative: Could this turn the tide on hyperscale cloud in Europe?

Nicky Stewart, senior adviser at the Open Cloud Coalition, retains doubts regarding strategy. After all, managing change across 27 member states remains “incredibly complex”. Regulation needs harmonisation, or even strengthening, and addressing competition could be simpler, she suggests.

“Certainly the hyperscalers have become all-powerful in technology; there’s been fast growth, enormous concentration, and, if you like, anti-competitive business practices,” Stewart says. “Buyers don’t always want the homogeneous, one-size-fits-all answer when it can be better provided with better customer service – and often keener pricing – by other cloud providers.”

Stevenage-based cloud services provider Civo is also a member of the Open Cloud Coalition. Chief commercial officer Simon Hansford adds that options are needed, with digital sovereignty entailing differential data handling. Some data is far more important and private. The way you handle, store and share it should recognise that.

“Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t travel abroad, but that we put more economic value on it,” adds Hansford.

EuroStack as it is envisaged would better recognise the value of data and related industries. If you do not have sovereignty over a given resource, you control how you drive value.

“A clear example might be Airbus. Europe decided to build its own aircraft, rather than becoming a manufacturing site or maintenance site for Boeing, which would have been very easy to do,” says Hansford.

Today, this appears to have been a good decision. Without recognition of value, it can be very difficult to develop a local ecosystem – from education, training and certification to OEM – that drives jobs and businesses beyond indirect sales and services.

“The majority of Europe’s cloud professionals are in sales, marketing, pre-sales engineering and the like. AWS and Microsoft might say they’ve got 1,000-2,000 people in the UK, but if they’re all pre-sales, there’s no research or core engineering done there,” Hansford points out. “We have got to start creating demand by moving money away from the hyperscalers into our local industry.”

Solange Viegas Dos Reis, chief legal officer at French infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider OVHCloud, points out that Amazon, Microsoft and Google have power that extends beyond cloud as well. “They have more and more power, and use that to strengthen what they have in other markets too,” she says.

OVHCloud has signed up. With EuroStack, business and industry have finally understood the direct impact that politics, and indeed geopolitics, can have on economics, she says, adding: “We need to get rid of dependencies on other countries where the political pressure can have a direct effect on us.”

Freedom of choice and innovation might be achieved by having a more open provider or by developing some smaller stacks with collaborative interoperability and transparency, with “good strategic partners” from outside the EU also involved.

She notes that when your data is hosted on hyperscaler servers, there is a risk that your activity competes with one or more of theirs, because they are so large and dominant. Or that it can be accessed by other governments for reasons with which you would not agree. Data and digital sovereignty is about more than competition.

“EuroStack makes me hope that we may go faster and be more precise on the needs,” she says. “It’s quite ambitious, for sure, but it’s driven by economics, business and industry, and with strong leaders. It’s not just a couple of lawyers in the room trying to make more regulation.”

Tackling the issues with regulation, top down, has not worked so far. Of course, it’s a challenge, not least because it involves companies from diverse sectors up and down tech stacks. And there will likely be resistance from some.

“We must coordinate everyone and identify the common challenges and elements,” Viegas Does Reis says. “But the objective will benefit all the world, the whole tech ecosystem.” 

Mark Neufurth, lead strategist and programme manager for SECA at cloud services provider Ionos, agrees that EuroStack models an initiative that could benefit organisations worldwide, and that is important.

“While there’s no [actual EuroStack progress] development as of now, Europe has to develop a ‘target picture’ in the light of current politics, which are changing fast,” he says. “Otherwise, we will be out of business in a matter of years in terms of digitisation and digital things.”

That’s all while the hyperscalers are still coming to, for instance, Berlin or wherever to take advantage of local innovation, Neufurth adds.

Meanwhile, EuroStack has seven layers and takes a “huge work package” to get it off the ground. Software, hardware and services must be defined, resourced and built. Local problems, including potential inertia, must be overcome. That said, there are already European designs for low-energy chips here, and the cloud API standard SECA, so that should all help, Neufurth says.

Of course, economies of scale must be developed. Other organisations, in other countries, can and should develop similar initiatives, including the UK – but partnering is key. Overall, however, the vision will take years, even decades, to materialise, Neufurth adds.

“Nonetheless, we need this. It’s essential that we emancipate ourselves a bit from China and the USA,” he says. “And there’ll be less of a single point for failures, and of course better competition.”