European alternatives to Amazon Web Services (AWS)

As concerns over US tariffs, data sovereignty, privacy regulations, and digital independence continue to grow, many European businesses and public institutions are actively seeking alternatives to dominant U.S.-based cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

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While AWS remains a global leader in cloud infrastructure, its market dominance raises questions around compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), vendor lock-in, and the broader goal of digital sovereignty. In response, a new wave of European cloud providers has emerged, offering competitive services aligned with European values of transparency, data protection, and local control.

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Scaleway is a cloud provider with a variety of services. Besides the public cloud called Scaleway Elements, they also offer dedicated servers and even renting racks in data centers.

The public cloud Scaleway Elements offers all the important components of a general cloud provider. There are virtual servers, an object storage service that is S3-compatible, DNS and VPC. They also offer some managed services like managed kubernetes or managed databases. The managed databases available are MySQL and PostgreSQL.

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Pricing: A development instance starts at €7.68 per month. Read more on the pricing page of the service.

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OVHcloud is a public cloud provider from France with a wide range of services. It offers the classic services such as virtual servers for different applications, object storage, managed databases and managed Kubernetes.

OVHcloud is also based on OpenStack and offers the possibility to configure the services via the OpenStack CLI.

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UpCloud is a cloud computing platform with servers around the world. They offer typical services like virtual servers, VPC, managed databases, managed Kubernetes and object storage. The block storage can be upgraded to achieve higher read and write speeds (IOPS), which can be useful for databases or other memory-intensive applications.

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Pricing: The cheapest general purpose instance with one core and 1GB RAM starts at €7/month. Read more on the pricing page of the service.

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Exoscale is a cloud computing platform from Switzerland with several server locations within Europe. It offers virtual servers, object storage (S3 compatible), managed kubernetes, managed databases, DNS and CDN. The managed database service offers Apache Kafka and Redis in addition to the commonly offered MySQL and PostgreSQL. The virtual servers are available in different strengths and specializations such as CPU, memory, storage optimized. In addition, own GPU instances are offered, which can be used for GPU intensive computations.

On the subject of API key permissions, API keys can be created that can be restricted to individual service groups such as "Compute". For the object storage service, it can even be restricted at bucket level.

The company is owned by A1, one of the largest Austrian communication providers.

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gridscale is a cloud computing platform from Germany. Like most general cloud providers, gridscale provides virtual servers, managed Kubernetes, managed databases, load balancers and object storage. They offer a big variety of database types like Postgres, Microsoft SQL, MariaDB, MySQL and Redis as a cache and as a storage. They also provide managed NFS (network file storage) servers, that can be helpful to share data between Kubernetes nodes. gridscale offers servers in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

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Pricing: Managed databases start at €50/month and €27/month for a virtual server. Read more on the pricing page of the service.

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Elastx is a cloud computing platform from Sweden. They use OpenStack and offer managed Kubernetes, object storage and a web application firewall. They operate three accessibility zones (AZ) in separate data centers in Sweden 20 km away from each other to host high availability applications.

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IONOS is a German cloud computing platform. They offer typical services like virtual servers, VPC, managed databases and object storage.

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Pricing: The prices for virtual servers are calculated per resource (GB of RAM or virtual core). The price for 1GB RAM is about 5$/month and the price per core starts at 18$/month. Read more on the pricing page of the service.

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In conclusion, the recent tariffs imposed by the U.S. on European goods have underscored the vulnerabilities of relying on American-based cloud services like AWS, particularly in terms of geopolitical risks and data sovereignty concerns.

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As European businesses and public institutions seek to reduce their exposure to external pressures, the demand for local cloud solutions that align with the EU’s strict privacy laws and regulatory frameworks is growing. European alternatives to AWS offer not only a way to ensure compliance with GDPR and other local regulations but also provide an opportunity to foster digital independence and strengthen the continent's tech ecosystem.