Few cheaper ones that come into mind: OVH (France), Hetzer (Germany) and Contabo (Germany). At least the two first ones have data centers in few other countries as well.

Yes, so SAP isn't doing much of a favor to Europe. More to their own pocket.

AWS was initially just for Amazon.com. Similar with Google's infrastructure.

A big EU business moving to their own cloud infrastructure is a good thing, even though you and I can't immediately take advantage of it.

Scaleway has a broad range of services, but their price competitiveness/reserved instance discount is a bit lacking.

Their "development" instances used to be the shit years and years ago.

You could get one running on their own custom hardware for like 4€/month, enough for a bunch of small utilities.

Tried to get one some time ago, but they've sold all of the capacity and it's not available. Need to check if that has changed.

Upcloud (Finland) is great, I'd vouch for them.

Supports lots of countries, affordable and the people there are super nice.

When I think of affordable cloud, it's all european providers.

Europe needs something similar to what the big three hyper scalers offer so a migration of sorts can happen without too much hassle for companies who deem that data sovereignty is a live or die kind of situation.

There are a lot of small providers here and there, but they can't offer the scale of even GCP (the smallest of the bunch).

there's a lot of affordable examples such as hetzner - what's missing?

Hetzner's great, and I'm a customer, but we're missing lots of stuff there – and some of the stuff that is there isn't reliable.

For example:

* Object storage: lots of horror stories out there regarding flakey performance so hard to justify sticking mission critical stuff there.

* Private networking: Again, too many anecdotes about loss of service. Lots of people just using the public IP6 interfaces to avoid their private networking entirely. And private networks are IP4 only.

* Kubernetes CSI: I've had issues with this where a PV gets in some locked state and I can't remove from console.

I'd love to see more competition here.

This is my daily AWS story, so I would probably feel right at home on Hetzner it seems!

Our experience with Hetzner /Cloud/ is similarly shaky. But Hetzner dedicated servers all altogether a different story.

We (lithus.eu) deal with their custom solutions team regularly and often provision private networks in the 10-100G range. On top of that we deploy MinIO and OpenEBS/Mayastor, and the whole thing just hums along very nicely indeed.

Branding. Businesses and governments are far more comfortable with the big names.

Its not just cloud. There is a lot of reliance on mobile OSes too, also American (and anything that needs updates is effectively controlled by whoever supplies the updates).

From past HN stories the EU is developing an age verification app that only works on Google attested Android or on iOS. The NHS relies on AWS. British courts use MS Teams for remote hearings. The majority of my clients (apart from some I guide elsewhere) use AWS - its the safe choice. AWS is the current "nobody ever got fired for buying X" supplier. Gmail holds the same position for email.

proper IAM, networking, object store (maybe they have this now) etc..

Stuff like BYOIP because many of their IP ranges are blocked by lots of services, reliability issues, extremely aggressive abuse team that will threaten to block your account for a network misconfiguration, bad performance, ...

Plex blocked Hetzner because people were reselling instances.

And it also seems that themoviedb.org also has an IP ban on Hetzner, found this out last week trying to build a tool that would've needed it to enrich its data.

The worst thing (at least for me) is that many Google Services block lots of Hetzner IPs. Even just running plain kubernetes is a problem, because the default Kubernetes container registry is hosted on Google Cloud Services...

Interesting. This is something I've yet to encounter, and we use Hetzner a lot for our clients (dedicated servers though, not cloud, so maybe that makes a difference).

Civo (UK) might be of interest