Best practices for evaluating European alternatives to AWS, Azure and GCP

Who this is for

This checklist is for engineering leads and platform teams who have been asked, by a customer, a DPO, or a procurement committee, to evaluate what it would take to run on European infrastructure instead of AWS, Azure or GCP. It is not a sovereignty lecture. It assumes you already understand why the question is on the table and you need a practical way to answer it: what private cloud infrastructure or EU cloud options actually match your current architecture, what breaks during a move, and what stays the same.

We work with SaaS platforms, agencies and e-commerce teams who run this evaluation every quarter as part of procurement cycles, tenders, or customer security questionnaires. The patterns below come from those engagements. None of them require you to abandon Kubernetes, Terraform or your existing CI/CD pipeline.

10 practices for evaluating private cloud infrastructure in Europe

1. Separate "EU region" from "EU jurisdiction" in your requirements. AWS, Azure and GCP all offer EU data center regions, but the parent company remains subject to US law, including the CLOUD Act, regardless of where the data physically sits. If your requirement is genuine jurisdictional separation, a regional toggle on a hyperscaler does not satisfy it. Write this distinction explicitly into your evaluation criteria before you start comparing vendors, or you will end up comparing the wrong thing.

2. Map your workload to infrastructure primitives, not to a brand. Most SaaS workloads need compute, object storage, managed Postgres or MySQL, a load balancer, and a CDN. List what you actually use today (API calls, storage classes, managed services) separately from the AWS or Azure product names. This turns "can we replace AWS" into "which EU providers offer S3-compatible object storage, managed PostgreSQL with point-in-time recovery, and a comparable autoscaling group." That is an answerable question.

   # Example: workload inventory before evaluationncompute: 12 vCPU, autoscaling 2-8 nodesnobject_storage: S3-compatible, 4TB, lifecycle rulesndatabase: managed PostgreSQL 15, 200GB, daily PITRncdn: edge caching, EU + UK pop coveragenqueue: managed Redis, 2GB, persistence enabledn

3. Check for S3 API compatibility before assuming a rewrite. Several European providers (OVHcloud, Scaleway, Exoscale, Hetzner via third-party gateways) expose S3-compatible object storage APIs. If your application already talks to S3 using the standard SDK, you can often repoint the endpoint and credentials without touching application code. Test this with a read/write smoke test against the new endpoint before planning a full migration.

   aws s3 cp test.txt s3://my-bucket/test.txt \n  --endpoint-url https://s3.de.io.cloud.ovh.net \n  --profile eu-providern

4. Treat the managed database layer as the highest-risk component. Compute is portable. Object storage is portable. Managed database services are where EU providers vary most in feature parity, replication tooling, and backup retention defaults. Before committing, run a full backup/restore cycle on the target provider and measure recovery time. If you are migrating a production database, the approach matters as much as the destination, which is why we wrote a separate breakdown of how zero-downtime database migrations work.

5. Benchmark network latency from your actual user base, not from a data center brochure. A provider based in Frankfurt or Amsterdam will serve EU users well, but if 20% of your traffic comes from the UK, US, or APAC, check real latency numbers before assuming parity with a hyperscaler's global edge network. Run synthetic tests from multiple regions using a tool like mtr or a distributed probe service, and compare p50/p95 figures, not averages.

6. Validate your CDN's actual point-of-presence footprint, not just its EU marketing claim. Some EU-headquartered CDN resellers still route traffic through non-EU origin infrastructure for certain regions. If data sovereignty is part of your requirement, ask the provider for a documented PoP list and trace actual request paths with curl -w timing output or a traceroute from your target markets. We cover this in more detail in understanding CDN data sovereignty: which providers keep EU traffic in EU.

7. Confirm the data center's actual certifications, and who holds them. Ask for the ISO 27001 and, where relevant, NEN 7510 certification of the physical data center, not the reseller or managed service layered on top. These certifications apply to the facility and its operational controls, not automatically to every company that racks servers in it. Request the certificate and scope statement directly rather than accepting a logo on a website.

8. Price the full stack, not just compute per hour. European providers are frequently cheaper on raw compute but the comparison falls apart if you forget egress fees, backup storage, IP allocation, and support tier costs. Build a like-for-like monthly cost model across at least three providers using your actual usage pattern, not a generic instance size. This is the same exercise we walk through in solving the real ROI question behind moving off US hyperscalers, and it usually surfaces a very different number than the headline instance price.

9. Test your Infrastructure as Code against the new provider before migrating anything live. If your Terraform or Pulumi modules target AWS-specific resources, you will need a provider swap, not a full rewrite, for most standard compute and networking. Run terraform plan against a sandbox account on the target provider early, so you catch unsupported resource types (certain autoscaling policies, specific VPC peering models) before they become a blocker mid-migration.

   provider "openstack" {n  auth_url    = var.ovh_auth_urln  domain_name = "default"n  tenant_name = var.ovh_project_idn}nnresource "openstack_compute_instance_v2" "app" {n  name            = "app-node-1"n  flavor_name     = "b2-15"n  image_name      = "Ubuntu 22.04"n  security_groups = ["default"]n}n

10. Plan the cutover as a reversible, staged migration, not a single switch. Run both environments in parallel with DNS-weighted traffic splitting, validate error rates and latency at each traffic percentage, and keep the old environment warm until the new one has handled a full peak traffic cycle. This is standard practice for any zero-downtime migration regardless of destination, and it is what prevents a sovereignty decision from becoming an availability incident.

Rolling this out in an existing team

You do not need to evaluate all 10 points in one sprint. Most teams run this in three phases:

Phase one (1-2 weeks): workload inventory and requirement separation (practices 1-2). This is a documentation exercise, not an infrastructure change, and it gives procurement or legal a concrete artifact to work from instead of a vague "move to Europe" directive.

Phase two (2-4 weeks): technical validation in a sandbox account with at least two candidate providers (practices 3-8). This runs in parallel with production, costs a few hundred euros in test resources, and produces real latency, cost, and compatibility numbers instead of vendor claims.

Phase three (4-10 weeks depending on scope): staged migration using IaC parity testing and a reversible cutover plan (practices 9-10). Keep a rollback window of at least one full business cycle before decommissioning the old environment.

Assign one engineer as the technical owner of the evaluation from day one. Splitting this across the team tends to produce inconsistent benchmarks that are hard to compare later. If your organization is also fielding sovereignty questions from customers or auditors during this process, the 12-question sovereignty audit every DPO should run is a useful companion checklist to run alongside the technical evaluation.

Where this leaves you

None of these practices require a leap of faith. They require inventory, benchmarking, and a staged rollout, the same discipline you would apply to any infrastructure change regardless of which provider's logo ends up on the invoice. The providers worth evaluating (OVHcloud, Scaleway, Exoscale, Hetzner, IONOS, and a handful of smaller regional specialists) each have real strengths and real gaps, and the right fit depends on your actual workload, not on a general preference for "European."

If implementing these yourself is not the best use of your engineering time, our managed services cover all of them by default.