European-only alternative to Google Cloud Platform.

Google Cloud is the smallest of the three US hyperscalers in EU market share but has the strongest data-engineering brand. That brand is the migration challenge: BigQuery, Vertex AI, Spanner and the rest of the GCP catalog are excellent tools, and there is no like-for-like EU sovereign replacement for some of them. The honest answer is that for most mid-market workloads - web applications, APIs, e-commerce - the EU sovereign stack is a clean fit. For specialised data-engineering or ML workloads, the conversation is more nuanced. We will tell you which category yours falls in.

United States EU-only replacement stack 14 services mapped
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Provider
Google Cloud Platform
Headquarters
Mountain View, CA
Jurisdiction
United States
Legal regime
CLOUD Act, FISA 702, EO 12333

"EU region" is not sovereignty. Four questions decide it.

Data residency tells you where the bits sit. Sovereignty tells you which legal system can compel access. The answer must hold on all four - or the stack is not sovereign.

Residency

Where is the data physically stored?

Not "in the cloud" - which datacenter, in which country, under which jurisdiction.

Subprocessors

Who else is in your data path?

Every vendor that touches the data: the CDN, the email relay, the error tracker, the analytics pipe.

Jurisdiction

Whose laws can compel disclosure?

A US-headquartered provider falls under FISA 702 and the CLOUD Act - even when the bits sit in Frankfurt.

Key custody

Who actually holds the encryption keys?

If the cloud provider holds both the data and the keys, the data is readable by them - regardless of any DPA.

Fails AWS · Azure · GCP · EU region

Fails on jurisdiction and key custody.

EU bits, US-headquartered parent, US subprocessors in the default path, provider-managed keys.

Passes Binadit managed stack

Passes on all four.

EU-hosted on EU-headquartered infrastructure. Zero US subprocessors in the default path. Customer-held or EU-KMS keys. Listed by name in your Article 28 DPA.

Why teams are exiting Google Cloud Platform

GCP exits we have scoped tend to come from one of two angles: a regulated workload that started small on GCP and now needs Schrems II compliance to grow, or a B2B SaaS whose enterprise customers (German banks, French government, Dutch healthcare) explicitly required no US-jurisdictional processor in the contract. The 2024 EU-US Data Privacy Framework legal challenges added a third trigger - leadership-level concern about another transfer-mechanism reversal. Licensed sovereign offerings improve the documentation but inherit the underlying US technology.

Google Cloud Platform services and their EU-only equivalents

A migration is not "swap one box for another". The mapping below is what we run for clients leaving Google Cloud Platform on Schrems II grounds - full EU jurisdiction, no US parent in the data path.

Compute Engine (GCE)

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. KVM virtual machines on Debian or Ubuntu, provisioned with Terraform and configured with Ansible.
Engineering note
Per-vCPU pricing dramatically lower on EU providers; reserved instances unnecessary at typical scale.

Cloud Storage

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. MinIO or Ceph RGW, S3-compatible.
Engineering note
S3-compatible APIs across all of these; SDK changes are minimal.

Cloud SQL

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. PostgreSQL or MySQL with Patroni for failover and pgBackRest for point-in-time recovery.
Engineering note
Streaming replication lets us cut over with seconds of downtime rather than a maintenance window, and restores are tested on a schedule instead of assumed.

GKE (managed Kubernetes)

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Kubernetes on Debian or Talos, with Cilium networking and cert-manager for certificates.
Engineering note
GKE Autopilot has no direct equivalent; for most workloads, managed K8s is sufficient. Talos on bare metal is our preferred high-trust setup.

Cloud Run

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Docker images built in GitLab CI and deployed to Kubernetes, with review environments per branch.
Engineering note
Knative is the upstream of Cloud Run; the migration is essentially a redeploy onto an EU-hosted Knative cluster.

BigQuery

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. ClickHouse or PostgreSQL with columnar extensions, modelled with dbt.
Engineering note
No 1:1 sovereign equivalent at BigQuery scale. ClickHouse self-hosted is the production pattern; for true Schrems II, this is the workload most clients keep on a documented hybrid.

Cloud Pub/Sub

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. RabbitMQ, NATS, or Redis Streams, depending on delivery guarantees.
Engineering note
Kafka is the standard pattern for high-volume event streams; NATS is lighter-weight.

Cloud Functions

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Knative or OpenFaaS on your Kubernetes cluster.
Engineering note
Functions migration is mechanical; cold-start performance on EU sovereign options is competitive.

Cloud DNS

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. PowerDNS or Knot, authoritative, DNSSEC signed.
Engineering note
Standard zone migration via AXFR or zone export.

Cloud CDN / Cloud Armor

What we run instead
We implement and operate an EU CDN for you: Bunny.net or KeyCDN, with Nginx and Varnish caching at your origin.
Engineering note
A CDN is one of the few layers we do not run ourselves. We pick the EU provider, configure cache headers, purge strategy and origin shielding, and operate it as part of the managed service.

IAM / Cloud Identity

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Keycloak or Authentik as the identity provider, with OIDC and SAML.
Engineering note
OIDC/SAML migration is well-trodden; Workspace identity is a separate decision.

Cloud Operations (Stackdriver)

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Prometheus, Grafana, Loki and Tempo, wired up with OpenTelemetry.
Engineering note
OpenTelemetry instrumentation makes the application-side migration trivial.

Vertex AI / model APIs

What we run instead
Binadit Private Infrastructure. Self-hosted open-weight models on dedicated GPU hardware, served through vLLM or Ollama.
Engineering note
This is the row where we are most likely to tell you the honest answer is a hybrid. Frontier model quality is not something self-hosting matches today.

Firestore / Firebase

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. MongoDB replica sets, or PostgreSQL with JSONB where the document model is thinner than it looks.
Engineering note
Firestore real-time sync is the hardest piece to replace; for document workloads, PostgreSQL + LISTEN/NOTIFY usually fits.

How we migrate off Google Cloud Platform

A typical mid-market migration runs in three phases. The numbers below assume a 6-10 person engineering team and a moderately complex application stack.

  1. Weeks 1-2

    Audit & data-engineering scope

    Inventory GCP services, classify by sovereignty necessity. Special attention to BigQuery and Vertex usage - these define the migration shape. Output: phased plan plus the explicit decision on data-engineering workloads.

  2. Weeks 3-6

    Edge, soft dependencies, IAM staging

    Cloud DNS, CDN, monitoring and Cloud Storage moved first. Keycloak deployed alongside Cloud Identity for parallel-run. Pre-stage compute on EU infrastructure.

  3. Weeks 6-14

    Core cutover + analytics decision

    GCE/GKE workloads cut over with blue-green. Cloud SQL replicated and switched. BigQuery either migrated to ClickHouse or kept on a documented hybrid with personal data scrubbed at the boundary. Vertex AI workloads moved to Mistral or self-hosted equivalents.

5-year TCO on GCP exits we have run: 30-50% cheaper for predictable workloads. The exception is BigQuery-heavy analytics - there the operational saving of GCP often justifies keeping it on a hybrid (with personal-data anonymisation at the boundary) rather than migrating.

Frequently asked questions

View all frequently asked questions

Does GCP "Sovereign Controls" or a licensed sovereign offering solve the issue?
Sovereign Controls (formerly Google Cloud Sovereign) adds operational separation: EU-resident staff, encryption key control, audit logging. It does not change the underlying jurisdiction - Google LLC remains the technology owner. Licensed sovereign offerings use the same technology under licence; the caveat sits at the technology layer. For most Schrems II analyses, both are improvements but not full sovereignty.
Can we keep BigQuery and migrate everything else?
Yes, and this is a common pattern. The discipline: scrub or anonymise personal data at the ingestion boundary so what enters BigQuery is no longer subject to GDPR. Document the boundary in your DPA. We have implemented this pattern for several mid-market analytics workloads.
What is the realistic ML/AI alternative?
Mistral AI (FR) for foundation models with comparable quality to GPT-4-class on European jurisdiction. Aleph Alpha (DE) for sovereign-by-design LLM workloads. For training, dedicated EU GPU hardware covers most use cases. The gap vs Vertex AI is in tooling polish, not raw capability.
How does GKE migration compare to AKS or EKS?
Mechanically similar - Helm charts, manifests and CI/CD pipelines transfer cleanly. GKE-specific addons (Workload Identity, GKE-managed cert-manager) need replacement with standard equivalents. Plan 1-2 weeks for the K8s addon migration.
How long does a GCP exit take?
For a mid-market application (GCE, Cloud SQL, GKE, Cloud Storage, no BigQuery): 10-14 weeks elapsed time. With a managed-infrastructure partner: 6-10 weeks. BigQuery in scope adds 4-8 weeks depending on the migration target.
What about Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive)?
Workspace is a separate conversation from GCP infrastructure. Many clients run a hybrid: GCP infrastructure replaced, Workspace kept with documented exposure. The mailbox.org migration path for Workspace is well-supported.

Plan your exit from Google Cloud Platform.

30-minute scoping call. We map your stack against EU-only alternatives, estimate the migration effort, and tell you whether it is the right call.

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