Best European Alternatives to AWS
Looking for a European alternative to Amazon Web Services? AWS is the largest cloud provider but is subject to US laws including the CLOUD Act, which can compel data disclosure.
European cloud providers offer competitive infrastructure with data sovereignty guarantees and GDPR compliance built in.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
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European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA or Switzerland, and processes customer data in Europe. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a vendor. Paid placement can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. Editorial policy
6 European Alternatives to AWS
OVHcloud
European cloud giant with global infrastructure
Key takeaways
- The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is real: it opened on 15 January 2026 in Brandenburg, under German companies led by EU citizens, with more than 90 services at launch.
- It is a separate cloud rather than a region toggle, so moving into it is a migration with a private price, not a setting you switch on.
- AWS waives egress charges when you leave, but you have to ask Support and finish within 90 days of approval.
- The twelve-month free tier is gone: new accounts get up to $200 in credits over six months and then close automatically.
- For teams whose real complaint is the bill rather than the law, Hetzner at roughly a quarter of hyperscaler pricing settles the argument faster than any sovereignty document.
Why people leave AWS
The version of this page that was true two years ago is not true now.
On 15 January 2026 AWS launched the European Sovereign Cloud with its first region in the German state of Brandenburg, operated through a new parent company and three subsidiaries incorporated in Germany, led by EU citizens, with what AWS describes as "zero operational access outside of EU borders" and more than €7.8 billion behind it. If your objection to AWS was that no American provider had built a genuinely European answer, one now exists.
So the useful question stopped being whether AWS has a sovereign option and became what that option does not cover. It is one region, separate from the account you already have, offering more than 90 services rather than the full catalogue. Your existing workload is not in it, and getting a price means a conversation: the pricing page says private pricing is available for eligible customers and points you at your account manager.
And for most teams none of this is why they are reading.
They are reading because the bill grew faster than the company, because four people now understand the IAM policies, and because the free tier they remember no longer exists — new accounts get $100 in credits, up to $200 over six months, and the account closes on its own after six months or when the credits run out. That is a different complaint from sovereignty, and Hetzner answers it better than any policy document.
- The sovereign cloud fixes location and staffing, not ownership Brandenburg, German entities, EU-resident operators and no operational access from outside the Union: those are real controls and they are more than any other hyperscaler has built as a separate cloud. What no control can change is who owns the shares in the parent company, and for a legal team that has read the CLOUD Act carefully, corporate control is the whole of the question rather than an implementation detail. Decide whether your requirement is about operations or about ownership before you evaluate anything, because the answer is different for each.
- The free tier people quote no longer exists AWS used to hand out twelve months of small instances, and half the comparison articles on the internet still describe that. Today a new account gets $100 in credits on sign-up and up to $100 more for exploring services — up to $200 over six months — and then closes by itself when the six months or the credits end, whichever comes first. More than 30 services stay free within monthly limits. Nothing about this is unreasonable; it is simply not the offer anyone remembers.
- The bill is a skill, and the skill is the cost Nobody leaves AWS because a service is missing. They leave because working out what they are paying for requires a person, and that person is more expensive than the servers. Reserved instances, savings plans, NAT gateway hours, cross-zone transfer, requests against storage: each is defensible and together they are a job. A European provider with an hourly instance price and bundled traffic removes the job rather than making it cheaper.
- Leaving is free now, and it is a process rather than a switch Since 5 March 2024 AWS waives data transfer out charges for customers moving off the platform, following the direction of the European Data Act. That is genuinely good and it is not automatic: you contact AWS Support, the request is reviewed at account level, credits are issued on approval, and since 30 September 2025 there is a 90-day window to complete the migration. Plan the request before the migration rather than after the invoice.
What you have to replace, not just match
AWS is not a product, it is roughly two hundred of them, so start by writing down what you actually run rather than which provider you would prefer.
Most estates are four things. Compute, which is EC2 or a container service and moves easily. Storage, which is S3 and moves easily if you use the API rather than the surrounding features. Managed data, which is RDS, DynamoDB, Kinesis, and moves with effort. And the glue — IAM, CloudFormation, Lambda triggers, EventBridge rules — which does not move at all, because it is a description of AWS itself.
Every provider on this page covers the first two. Scaleway and Cyso Cloud reach furthest into the third. Nothing here replaces the fourth, and a team whose architecture is mostly glue is looking at a redesign rather than a migration. That is worth knowing on day one instead of in month three.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Cyso Cloud | Alkmaar, Netherlands | Transparent usage-based, no lock-in | EU (Netherlands) |
| #2 | Hetzner | Gunzenhausen, Germany | From about €4.51/month (Cloud VPS) | EU (Germany) |
| #3 | Infomaniak | Geneva, Switzerland | From CHF 5.75/month (kSuite); kDrive Solo free | Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #4 | Exoscale | Lausanne, Switzerland | From about CHF 5.50/month (Compute) | Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #5 | Scaleway | Paris, France | From about €0.0025/hour (DEV1-S) | EU (France) |
| #6 | OVHcloud | Roubaix, France | From about €3.50/month (VPS) | EU (France) |
How each alternative compares to AWS
- Which law reaches it. EU (Netherlands). AWS is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Amsterdam and Frankfurt — EU only.
- Source code. Open source, where AWS is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. ISO 27001, NEN 7510.
Best for: Dutch healthcare, government and regulated buyers who have to show an auditor
Cyso Cloud is run by the Cyso Group from Alkmaar, has been operating since 1997, and keeps its infrastructure in Amsterdam and Frankfurt with nothing outside the EU. It holds ISO 27001 and NEN 7510, the Dutch information-security standard for healthcare, which is the specific document a Dutch hospital or care provider is asked for and which no AWS certification substitutes for.
It is also built on open-source foundations rather than a proprietary stack, and that matters more against AWS than against any other provider here. The reason an AWS migration is expensive is that the skills and the templates only describe AWS. Where the platform underneath is open source, what your team learns is portable to any other operator running the same software, which turns the exit question into a smaller one.
The honest limits are size and shape. There is no published self-service price list of the kind AWS has trained you to expect, evaluation starts with a conversation rather than a credit card, and the catalogue is a fraction of two hundred services. This is a supplier for organisations that want a named account team and an audit file, not for a developer who wants an instance in ninety seconds.
What Cyso Cloud does better than AWS
- NEN 7510 alongside ISO 27001, which is the certification Dutch healthcare procurement asks for by name and which no AWS region provides
- A Dutch company under Dutch and EU law, with no American parent anywhere in the ownership chain
- Open-source foundations, so the operational knowledge your team builds is not a description of one vendor
- Amsterdam and Frankfurt only, so there is no global control plane to reason about
- Usage-based pricing without the reserved-instance and savings-plan arithmetic that makes an AWS bill a specialism
Where Cyso Cloud is a step down from AWS
- A tiny catalogue next to AWS, with none of the analytics, messaging or machine learning services
- No instant self-service sign-up: evaluation begins with contacting the company
- Two data centre locations against AWS regions on every continent
- Far less third-party tooling and documentation written for it
Standout against AWS. It is the only provider here that combines a Dutch audit file with an open-source platform, which answers both halves of the question an AWS exit usually raises: who is liable, and how do we leave again.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). AWS is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Germany (Falkenstein, Nuremberg) and Finland (Helsinki), plus Oregon, Virginia and Singapore.
- Source code. Closed source, as AWS is.
- Independently checked. ISO 27001.
Best for: Teams whose AWS problem is the invoice and the finance meeting it causes
Hetzner Online GmbH has been running from Gunzenhausen since 1997, with its European data centres in Germany and Finland and further locations in the United States and Singapore.
A cloud server with 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM and 40 GB of SSD starts at about €4.51 a month, and most plans include 20 TB of outbound traffic with inbound free. Set that against an AWS bill where compute, storage, transfer, requests and gateway hours are five separate lines and the comparison is not close.
What that buys is not just a lower number but a predictable one. The thing that exhausts teams on AWS is that the bill responds to success in ways nobody modelled: a launch goes well and the transfer line triples. With traffic bundled, growth stops being a billing event, and the person who currently spends a day a month on cost explorer gets that day back.
The trade is that Hetzner sells servers, not a platform. There is no managed Kubernetes control plane of AWS's sophistication, no serverless runtime, no event bus, no analytics suite, and support is efficient rather than white-glove. If your AWS account is mostly EC2, EBS and an S3 bucket, this is a straight and enormous saving. If it is mostly managed services, you are taking on operations you currently rent.
What Hetzner does better than AWS
- Roughly three to five times cheaper than the equivalent hyperscaler instance, which is the number most AWS exits are actually about
- 20 TB of outbound traffic included and inbound free, against an AWS bill that meters transfer, requests and gateway hours separately
- No charges for API calls, snapshots or data retrieval, so a bill can be predicted rather than explained
- A German company with no US parent, whose European data centres are in Germany and Finland
- Pricing published in full, with no private pricing conversation and no account manager in the path
Where Hetzner is a step down from AWS
- A managed-service catalogue that is a rounding error next to AWS's two hundred products
- Two European data centre countries, both in northern Europe, against AWS regions on every continent
- No free tier at all, where AWS still gives new accounts credits and keeps 30-plus services free within limits
- Support is efficient rather than the enterprise support organisation AWS sells
Standout against AWS. Bundled egress is the single line that changes an AWS migration from a saving into a different relationship with growth, and Hetzner bundles 20 TB of it.
- Which law reaches it. Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA). AWS is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Switzerland (Geneva, Winterthur).
- Source code. Closed source, as AWS is.
- Independently checked. ISO 27001.
Best for: Organisations whose AWS bill is really email, files and meetings rather than servers
Infomaniak Network SA has operated from Geneva since 1994 and runs its own data centres in Geneva and Winterthur on renewable power, holding ISO 27001. It belongs on this page for a reason that is easy to miss: a surprising share of AWS accounts are not running an application at all. They are holding backups, a file share, a mail relay and a handful of virtual machines that support an office rather than a product.
For that account, replacing AWS with another infrastructure provider replaces one thing you do not want to operate with another. The kSuite line — kDrive for storage, kMail, kMeet, kChat — is a workplace rather than a platform, starting at CHF 5.75 per user per month, with kDrive Solo free at 15 GB so the storage half can be tested before any commitment.
The limits are exactly what you would expect. This is not infrastructure: there is no S3-compatible object storage API to point your build at, no Kubernetes, no instances to size. Swiss Franc pricing moves with the exchange rate if you buy from the Union, and Switzerland holds an adequacy decision rather than sitting inside the EEA. If you run an application on AWS, one of the other five entries is your answer and this one is not.
What Infomaniak does better than AWS
- Replaces the workplace half of an AWS account — storage, mail, meetings, chat — with one supplier instead of a rack of services
- Owns and runs its data centres in Geneva and Winterthur on renewable energy, rather than renting capacity
- Swiss jurisdiction, outside both US reach and EU institutions, with an adequacy decision for lawful transfers
- A free 15 GB kDrive tier, so the migration can be tested at no cost
- Per-user pricing from CHF 5.75 a month, which is a number a finance director can forecast
Where Infomaniak is a step down from AWS
- Not infrastructure at all: no instances, no object storage API, no Kubernetes, so most AWS workloads cannot move here
- Swiss Franc pricing exposes buyers inside the Union to the exchange rate
- Adequacy decision rather than intra-EEA processing, which some procurement rules treat differently
- A much smaller integration ecosystem than anything in the AWS marketplace
Standout against AWS. It is the only entry here that asks whether you needed a cloud provider at all, which for the quieter kind of AWS account is the question worth asking first.
- Which law reaches it. Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA). AWS is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria.
- Source code. Closed source, as AWS is.
Best for: Teams that want European infrastructure with a Swiss company holding the contract
Exoscale has been operating from Lausanne since 2011 and is part of A1 Digital, with zones in Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Bulgaria. Compute starts from about CHF 5.50 a month, with trial credits to evaluate on. Against AWS the pitch is a European-operated platform with an ordinary catalogue: instances, object storage, managed databases, Kubernetes, private networking.
What distinguishes it from the other EU entries here is the jurisdiction. A Swiss company sits outside the Union and outside the United States, holding an adequacy decision that makes transfers lawful without extra machinery. Some organisations regard that as the strongest available position; others regard it as an unnecessary extra border to explain to a regulator. It is a decision to make deliberately rather than a detail to discover.
The Bulgarian zone is worth noting for a specific reason: it is the only south-eastern European location on this page, which matters for latency in a part of the continent that hyperscaler-shaped comparisons usually ignore. What Exoscale does not have is AWS's depth — the managed analytics, the messaging fabric, the machine learning services are simply absent.
What Exoscale does better than AWS
- A Swiss company, so neither US jurisdiction nor EU institutions hold the contract, with an adequacy decision covering transfers
- Zones in Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Bulgaria, including the only south-eastern European location on this page
- A conventional catalogue — instances, object storage, managed databases, Kubernetes — without the AWS pricing arithmetic
- Trial credits, so the platform can be evaluated before committing
- Part of A1 Digital, so the parent is a European telecommunications group rather than a US corporation
Where Exoscale is a step down from AWS
- Swiss Franc pricing and a non-EEA jurisdiction, which some EU procurement rules treat as a transfer to explain
- Nothing comparable to AWS's analytics, messaging or machine learning catalogue
- Four countries against AWS regions worldwide, so global latency needs a second supplier
- Smaller community and less third-party tooling than any hyperscaler
Standout against AWS. It is the only provider here whose footprint reaches south-eastern Europe, which is the part of the map an AWS-to-Europe migration usually quietly abandons.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). AWS is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw — EU only.
- Source code. Closed source, as AWS is.
Best for: Estates that use real managed services and cannot move to plain servers
Scaleway belongs to the Iliad group, operates from Paris and keeps its regions in Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw. Of everything on this page it has the widest catalogue: object storage with an S3-compatible API, managed Kubernetes, managed Postgres and MySQL, serverless containers and functions, block storage, private networks and GPU instances. For an AWS estate that is more than instances and buckets, this is the entry that can hold most of it.
The GPU range matters for a reason specific to 2026. A growing share of AWS bills is inference, and teams discovering that their model spend has to stay inside the Union usually find that their infrastructure choice and their inference choice have to be made together. Keeping both with one French company avoids a second jurisdiction conversation six months later.
What you will not find is the long tail, and it is the long tail that makes AWS hard to leave. There is no equivalent of the event bus, the workflow engine or the analytics suite, documentation is thinner for anything unusual, and support below the enterprise tiers is community-based. Budget for replacing a few AWS services with open-source software you now operate.
What Scaleway does better than AWS
- The widest managed catalogue of any EU-owned provider here, so most of an AWS estate fits inside one account
- S3-compatible object storage, managed Kubernetes and managed Postgres, which are the three services most AWS migrations stall on
- GPU instances under the same French contract, so inference does not become a second sovereignty decision
- Regions in Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw with nothing outside the EU, and a French parent company
- Hourly billing from about €0.0025 with no savings plans or reserved instances to model
Where Scaleway is a step down from AWS
- No equivalent of AWS's event, workflow and analytics services, which have to be replaced with software you run
- Three regions against AWS's global footprint, so worldwide latency needs another supplier
- Community support below the enterprise tiers, against AWS's support organisation
- Documentation and third-party guides are thin for anything outside the common path
Standout against AWS. It is the only EU-owned provider here that can hold compute, storage, managed databases, Kubernetes and GPUs in a single account, which is what makes it a destination rather than a partial answer.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). AWS is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. 30+ data centres, majority in Europe.
- Source code. Closed source, as AWS is.
- Independently checked. SecNumCloud (ANSSI), GAIA-X founding member.
Best for: Public bodies and regulated industries whose requirement names SecNumCloud
OVHcloud SAS operates from Roubaix, runs more than thirty data centres with the majority in Europe, builds its own servers, and is a founding member of Gaia-X. It is the only provider on this page with SecNumCloud qualification from ANSSI, the French cybersecurity agency, which requires processing on French territory by French staff under French law and immunity from non-European legislation.
That is the sharpest available contrast with the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, and it is a contrast about kind rather than degree. AWS built German companies, put EU residents in the operational chain and committed that no operational access comes from outside the Union. SecNumCloud goes to a place a subsidiary structure cannot reach, which is why it appears in French and increasingly European public procurement.
In every other respect this is a broad, ordinary and occasionally confusing catalogue. Bare metal, public cloud, hosted private cloud, storage, a CDN, domains and DNS from one company, with VPS pricing from around €3.50 a month. The breadth is the problem as much as the benefit: identifying the right combination of OVHcloud products takes longer than it should, and the qualification applies to part of the range rather than all of it.
What OVHcloud does better than AWS
- SecNumCloud qualification from ANSSI on part of the range, which specifies French territory, French staff and immunity from non-European law
- More than thirty data centres with the majority in Europe, and hardware the company designs and builds itself
- A founding member of Gaia-X, which several European tenders now reference directly
- Bare metal, public cloud, private cloud, storage, CDN, domains and DNS under one French contract
- Euro pricing from about €3.50 a month for a VPS, with no credit or savings-plan model to interpret
Where OVHcloud is a step down from AWS
- A very broad catalogue, so choosing the right products takes longer than it should
- SecNumCloud covers part of the range rather than everything, so the qualification has to be checked per service
- Managed services are fewer and less polished than AWS equivalents
- Support quality varies by tier, against an AWS support organisation built for enterprises
Standout against AWS. It is the only entry here whose sovereignty claim has been audited by a national cybersecurity agency rather than asserted in a corporate structure.
What actually breaks when you switch
Infrastructure as code is where the estimate breaks. CloudFormation and the CDK do not describe servers, they describe AWS, so every template is a document about services that exist nowhere else. Terraform survives the move with new providers and rewritten resources, which is work but is bounded. Anything written in CloudFormation is thrown away, and the team that wrote it is the team doing the migration.
Identity is the second thing, and it is quieter. IAM roles, policies and trust relationships encode years of decisions about who may do what, and they have no export format that another provider understands. Expect to rebuild access control by hand, expect the rebuild to surface permissions nobody can justify, and treat that discovery as a benefit rather than a delay.
And request the egress waiver before you start, not after the first invoice. AWS reviews the request at account level and grants credits on approval, and the clock that starts is 90 days. A migration that has not been planned into that window will either be rushed or will pay for its own transfer, and both outcomes are avoidable with one support ticket sent early.
Does the AWS European Sovereign Cloud solve the CLOUD Act problem?
It addresses more of it than anything AWS has offered before, and it does not close it. The infrastructure sits in the European Union, the operating companies are German, the people with operational access are EU residents, and AWS states there is no operational access from outside the Union. Against a requirement written about where data sits and who can touch it, that is a serious answer.
Against a requirement written about corporate control it is not, because the German parent company remains part of Amazon. Whether a US disclosure order can reach data held by a European subsidiary is a contested legal question rather than a settled one, and a page like this should not pretend otherwise.
The practical test is to read your own requirement out loud. If it says the data must be processed in the EU by EU staff, the sovereign cloud satisfies it. If it says the provider must not be subject to a foreign disclosure regime, you need a provider whose owners are European, and that is what the six tools below are.
What does it actually cost to leave AWS?
The egress that everyone worries about is the part that is now free. AWS already gives 100 GB a month to the internet at no charge, and since March 2024 it waives data transfer out entirely for customers migrating away. You contact Support, the account is reviewed, credits are issued, and you have 90 days from approval.
The cost is engineering time. Rewriting IAM policies as something else, replacing CloudFormation, unpicking Lambda functions that are wired to queues and events, and re-testing everything is weeks of work for a modest estate and quarters for a large one.
The saving is usually larger than people expect, but it arrives as a smaller invoice rather than a payment, so it does not fund the project. Get that agreed in advance or the migration stalls at eighty per cent, which is the most expensive place to stop.
Is a single European provider enough, or do I need several?
For most teams one is enough and two is a mistake dressed up as resilience. The reason people end up with several is that they replace AWS service by service — object storage here, compute there, a managed database somewhere else — and end up operating three relationships instead of one.
Scaleway and Cyso Cloud both offer enough of a catalogue that a typical estate fits inside one account. Hetzner covers compute and storage brilliantly and expects you to bring your own managed services. Exoscale sits between the two.
If you genuinely need multi-provider redundancy, design it deliberately with the same workload running in two places, rather than accidentally with different workloads stranded in different accounts.
Which of these is closest to being an AWS-shaped catalogue?
Scaleway, by some distance, and it is still a smaller shape. Object storage with an S3-compatible API, managed Kubernetes, managed Postgres, serverless containers and functions, GPU instances and a private network cover the majority of what an ordinary AWS account contains.
What none of them have is the long tail: the queue service, the event bus, the workflow engine, the twelve analytics products, the machine learning platform. If your architecture leans on those, you are replacing them with open-source software you run yourself, which is a real cost and also a permanent reduction in lock-in.
Cyso Cloud is the interesting case here because its platform is built on open-source foundations, so what you learn transfers to any other operator of the same stack. That is the opposite of the AWS proposition, where the skills are the lock-in.
Which one to pick
If your requirement is about where data sits and who operates it, AWS now has an answer of its own and it deserves to be evaluated rather than dismissed: Brandenburg, German companies, EU-resident operators, more than 90 services. Ask for the private pricing, and compare it with the providers below rather than with the AWS account you have today.
If your requirement is about who owns the company holding your data, the sovereign cloud does not reach it and no configuration will. Scaleway is the destination for an estate that uses real managed services, Cyso Cloud for one that has to satisfy a Dutch auditor, and OVHcloud for one whose tender uses the word SecNumCloud.
If you are here about money rather than law — and most people are — Hetzner is the answer and the gap is large enough that the rest of the comparison is decoration. Bundled traffic and a published price list remove the role your finance team currently pays someone to fill.
And if what you actually run on AWS is a company rather than a product, look at Infomaniak before you shop for instances. Replacing a hyperscaler with a smaller hyperscaler is the wrong move when what you needed was a workplace.
Frequently Asked Questions
Cyso Cloud if the requirement is an audited Dutch operator on open-source foundations, particularly in healthcare where NEN 7510 is asked for. Hetzner if the requirement is the lowest sane price for compute and storage.
Scaleway if you need the widest catalogue in the EU. Exoscale if Switzerland suits you better than the Union. OVHcloud if a procurement officer wrote the requirement and used the word SecNumCloud. Infomaniak if what you run on AWS is a workplace rather than an application.
Yes, since 15 January 2026. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud opened its first region in Brandenburg, Germany, is operated by a new parent company and three German subsidiaries led by EU citizens, launched with more than 90 services, and is backed by an investment of more than €7.8 billion. AWS states it has no operational access from outside EU borders. Local Zones are planned in Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal.
No, and conflating them is the most common error in this discussion. Frankfurt is a region of the ordinary AWS cloud, operated globally, reachable from your existing account. The European Sovereign Cloud is a separate cloud with its own governance, its own operators and its own service list, which you migrate into rather than select from a dropdown.
Not if you are leaving and you ask. AWS waives data transfer out to the internet for customers migrating off the platform, a policy announced on 5 March 2024 that follows the direction set by the European Data Act. You request it through AWS Support, the account is reviewed, credits are granted on approval, and there is a 90-day window to complete the move. Outside that programme, the first 100 GB a month to the internet is free anyway.
It was replaced. New accounts receive $100 in credits on sign-up and can earn up to $100 more by using key services, up to $200 over six months, after which the account closes on its own — or sooner if the credits run out. More than 30 services remain always free within monthly limits. The twelve months of free small instances that most comparison articles still describe is no longer the offer.
For plain compute, typically three to five times, and the gap is widest on traffic. Hetzner starts around €4.51 a month for 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM and 40 GB of SSD with 20 TB of outbound traffic included, where an equivalent AWS instance plus its transfer is billed in several separate lines. For managed services the gap narrows, and for anything using the AWS long tail the comparison stops being like for like.
Mostly yes. Scaleway, Exoscale, OVHcloud and Cyso Cloud all offer object storage with an S3-compatible API, so rclone, the AWS CLI pointed at a different endpoint, and most SDKs keep working with a changed configuration. What does not travel is the behaviour around the API: lifecycle rules, storage classes, event notifications and bucket policies differ per provider and need rewriting rather than copying.
It can be used compliantly, with a data processing agreement, EU regions and a long list of certifications, and since January 2026 with a separate European cloud under German companies. What GDPR compliance never settles is jurisdiction over the corporate group, which is why organisations with a foreign-disclosure clause in their risk assessment end up looking at European-owned providers regardless of how good the certifications are.
A handful of EC2 instances and an S3 bucket is a fortnight, most of it testing. A typical production estate with managed databases, a container platform and infrastructure as code is one to two quarters. An estate built on Lambda, EventBridge, Step Functions and IAM as an architecture is not a migration at all, it is a rewrite of the parts of your system that describe AWS, and it should be budgeted as one.
Who worked on this review
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