What's your recommendation for a EU-based PaaS?
We are based in Germany, but have customers on 4 continents. GDPR obviously plays a big role for us and I have a queasy feeling in my tummy that we better find a EU-based hoster in the next year.
I am looking for a EU-based Heroku alternative. Anybody of you with a recommendation?
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Hetzner or OVH, but you cannot really compare them to Heroku I think.
One issue you'll be facing is not just GDPR, but also Schrems II. Schrems II basically makes it illegal to host private information on servers that are owned by a company outside the EU (AWS, Google, Azure, ...) that doesn't ensure GDPR compliance. US-based companies for example operate under the cloud act, which means the government can order them to give access to private data at any time, even if the data centers are located in the EU.
Thanks. First, is the Cloud considered servers? Second, I thought most of the big tech comps have a legal presence in the EU, so they are in the EU, in a way??
"The cloud" is also considered servers/VM, but to some, it's much more than that. I personally would call OVH and Hetzner cloud providers that lack a few features you might be used from AWS, Google, Azure, and so on.
Of course, all these larger providers have local subsidies in the EU, but I think they basically said that they still fall under the cloud act as the parent company has access to the data "owned" by the subsidy. So they are only technically based in the EU, but not from a privacy perspective.
Sorry, should I have mentioned that (of course) Schrems II is one of the primary reasons for us looking for EU-based alternatives.
Schrems II and whatever else might be coming next is the reason I am looking for an alternative. I am still waiting for a prominent company to be sued noticably for disregarding Schrems II, and I for sure don't want to be caught in a rush to migrate.
I have years of experience in IaaS, and thus know just what an intense time sink it is, which is why I am looking for a PaaS. The EU really is way behind in this regard. :(
I'd love to see EU based PaaS that is as simple to use. For example alternative to render.com
Might be an opportunity to build one :)
I would seriously consider it if there would be enough interest.
I'm quite happy with https://scalingo.com . It is (nearly) Heroku compatible.
There's also clever-cloud.com, but it did not work well for my app.
And there's scaleway.com (no real experience).
We are big fans of gitops. Connect the repo and be done with it. Throw in some buildpacks for customization, pure magic. Nobody seems to support that.
I read that Scalingo is really close to the Heroku experience. Is it?
Clever Cloud looks really good. They seem to use lots of OVH datacenters.
And scaleway? Definitely checking them out!
Yes, Scalingo.com is quite Heroku compatible, they even have buildpacks.
Obviously there are slight differences in container scaling, and scalingo has zero downtime deployments.
What legal consequences can you face when using non-EU hosting/paas for EU-based business? Is it not GDPR compliant?
I use Clever Cloud for a few years and they are working fine for me.
Hetzner, been using it for years to host my analytics, no issues whatsoever...
I do think about such topic quite often. Currently I am using DigitalOcean, and I host everything on EU-based data centers.
DigitalOcean’s Developer Experience is quite great in my opinion.
We use DO Spaces for encrypted storage (no PII involved, everything's encrypted before upload) and yes, the dev xp is really nice. But then, still a US-based company.
Does azure count? It has very specific zone limitations and compliance
For GDPR as far as I understand no. It's not enough with servers etc in EU. Any American company is off-limit since in theory they could comply with American laws (even if they claim they wouldn't) and since you can't prove that the American company isn't cooperating with the American govt they are off-limit.
Which is pretty crazy because how many European companies can actaully survive with no connections to American companies? My guess is 99% of companies violate it in some way.
Eu can go back to stone age. Think developers with no access to stack overflow. Google. 4g/5g. I mean they are thinking about privacy for mostly behaving corporations. But hackers have done this far extensively...but that's story for another day. Tldr; eu pretty much lost in tech age and they just can't make these demands. Imagine they can't get access to tsmc...
That is exactly our concern as well. :-(
My personal view is that everyone is breaking the rules (probably including govt:s themselves) so odds for getting fined for it is pretty low (unless you are doing some shady stuff or you are big enough to made an example of)
Yeah, couldn't agree more. The only noticable GDPR fines I read about were about misusing customer data and not removing people from mailing lists (Delivery Hero Germany). I am not aware of a single case where Schrems II was relevant :-(
We are happy with OVH. Their PaaS is a pretty new offering but overall, the OVH as an organization is growing in quality and services.
https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-ie/public-cloud/journey-paas/
OVH? Interesting. I know them, but did not know they now had a PaaS offering. They got so much bad press in the past that I somehow omitted them from my list. I'll check them out. Thanks for the tip!