One thing that became extremely clear after anti-Russian sanctions were imposed is that multinational corporations absolutely belong to specific country or set of countries.
Putting government websites and services on AWS or Azure pretty much precludes independent foreign or domestic policy. It's ok now (UK and US are pretty tight) but things/alliances change and in 20 or 30 years it could become huge problem.
> One thing that became extremely clear after anti-Russian sanctions were imposed is that multinational corporations absolutely belong to specific country or set of countries.
"Set of countries", aka economy yes, "single country" no. If every nation except the US allied with Russia over Ukraine, I'm not so sure McDonald's would have pulled out of Russia.
US can force Microsoft or Google to pull out of UK in the same way Russian government can force Gazprom to stop selling gas to Germany. Again it's unlikely in current geopolitical situation but imagine that fascists or communists come to power in US (both are non zero probability). If there is one thing that history teaches us is that alliances are unstable.
Also US can easily force McDonalds to pull out of Russia - CEO and leadership live in US and have to comply with US sanctions unless they want to pull Lavabit or spend time in jail.
Scalingo https://scalingo.com is basically a french Heroku-compatible PaaS based on a reliable french IaaS (Outscale, cloud subsidiary of Dassault Systemes, the famous maker of Catia, Solidworkds, etc)
I understand the intent of the question, but in this case a UK-based alternative would be preferable, not just a European alternative. The UK is more likely to find itself at odds with France than the U.S.
That thought reminds me of a conversation in an episode of Yes Prime Minister:
> Hacker: I sometimes wonder why we need the [nuclear] weapons.
> Sir Humphrey: Minister! You're not a unilateralist?
> Hacker: I sometimes wonder, you know.
> Sir Humphrey: Well, then, you must resign from the government!
> Hacker: Ah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not that unilateralist! Anyway, the Americans will always protect us from the Russians, won't they?
> Sir Humphrey: Russians? Who's talking about the Russians?
> Hacker: Well, the independent deterrent.
> Sir Humphrey: It's to protect us against the French!
> but in this case a UK-based alternative would be preferable
For you maybe, but not for me :) I just took advantage of the threat to ask a slightly unrelated question (although parent mentioned Ireland as well, so maybe slightly on topic at least)
Platform.sh is another (employee here). We're a French PaaS and DevOps platform. So we provide hosting, but also every bit of operations needed to provision infrastructure and true staging environments for every pull request/branch with just a `git branch`. We work with Azure, GCP, AWS for 9+ regions across the globe, many of those in Europe. This has allowed us to also provide the backend for OVHCloud's WebPaaS (https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/web-paas/) behind-the-scenes.
"If I sign up to your service and deploy stuff to one of your Europe-based data centers, will my data ever land on a US-based company's servers?" [______]
Edit: Apparently not! Didn't even have to sign up to the service (just loaded the landing page) and my data ended up on some US-based (Google) entity's servers (fonts.googleapis.com).
Looks like a nice platform, unfortunately doesn't seem too privacy-aware so gonna have to find something else.
It will. As long as the company does business in the us then american governmenet can force access to data hosted somewhere else. They did it in the past theyll do it again
If you count Russia to be European, which is debatable from both a cultural and a geographical perspective. Yandex only has one data center outside of Russia/definitely in Europe, and last I heard, they needed 600,000€ worth of diesel per day to keep it running.
