AWS vs European Cloud Providers

AWS vs European Cloud Providers: What Really Changes Once You’re in Production

For many teams operating in Europe, choosing AWS is not really a decision. It is simply what happens. Someone needs infrastructure, timelines are tight, and AWS feels like the safest possible answer. Mature platform, endless documentation, an ecosystem where almost any problem already has a solution.

European cloud providers usually enter the conversation much later, often framed around regulation, data residency, or political considerations. Seldom as a first instinct.

Yet, when systems have been running for a year or two, the differences that matter most tend to have very little to do with ideology or marketing promises. They show up quietly, in the day-to-day reality of operating production systems.

Most comparisons start with pricing. Cost per hour, cost per gigabyte, network egress fees. These numbers are easy to line up and reassuringly precise. They also tend to explain surprisingly little about why some platforms feel comfortable to operate over time, while others slowly become a source of friction.

What really shapes long-term cost and efficiency is not the unit price of a resource, but how much effort it takes to understand,
operate, and adjust the system once it grows beyond its initial shape.

Support is a good example. On paper, enterprise support contracts look broadly similar. In practice, the experience can be very different. With large hyperscalers, interactions are usually mediated through ticketing systems, multiple escalation layers, and globally distributed teams. This works well for standardized issues, but can feel heavy when problems are contextual, subtle, or tied to architectural choices made months earlier.

Many European providers operate at a different scale. Support teams are smaller, escalation paths shorter, and conversations more direct. This does not automatically make them better, but it does change the nature of operational incidents: Time zones align, context is retained, conversations feel less transactional.

Contracts tell a similar story. Hyperscalers rely on highly standardized agreements. Negotiation exists, but it is limited and often reserved for very large customers. European providers tend to work with simpler contractual frameworks, clearer exit clauses, and a greater willingness to adapt to local legal constraints. For organizations subject to audits, public procurement rules, or sector-specific regulation, this difference often becomes visible only once the system is already in place.

Vendor lock-in is another area where theory and practice diverge. It is rarely a binary state. Lock-in grows gradually, through managed services, proprietary APIs, operational tooling, and internal habits. AWS offers extremely powerful abstractions, and those abstractions can be a significant advantage. They can also make future changes more complex than initially anticipated.

European providers typically offer fewer high-level managed services. This shifts responsibility back to the teams, sometimes increasing operational effort, but also preserving a degree of architectural freedom. The trade-off is not purely technical. It is organizational, and it affects how reversible decisions remain over time.

None of this means AWS is the wrong choice. In many situations, it remains the best one. Global products, advanced data or AI workloads, and organizations with strong internal platform teams often benefit from what hyperscalers provide. The issue is not choosing AWS. It is choosing it by default, without fully considering the long-term operational shape it implies.

Cloud provider selection is often treated as a tactical step, something that can be revisited later if needed. In reality, it is a structural decision. It influences how teams work, how costs evolve, how contracts are managed, and how much room there is to change direction when constraints shift.

The most effective cloud strategies we encounter in Europe are not driven by ideology. They are pragmatic. They start by understanding operational realities, organizational maturity, and regulatory exposure, and only then move toward a provider choice.

That sequence matters more than the logo on the invoice.

If this reflection connects with a concrete situation in your organization, you can reach out and share some context.

— Horacio Durán, Dumontix