Provider comparison of European cloud services

In this article, you’ll read

• how important the maturity level of a European cloud platform is,
• what additional services you should look for 
• and how well European clouds perform in Infrastructure as Code and IAM.

The independent Dutch consulting firm T&T Data Consultancy has published a white paper with practical tips for determining a European cloud’s maturity level. The paper is based on a specific project for the municipality of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

The topic of “digital sovereignty” is a concern for companies and public institutions in many European countries, not just in Germany. Users often view European clouds as useful tools for achieving their digital sovereignty. But while the US hyperscalers and their capabilities are well known, many users in Europe are unclear about the European cloud provider landscape and, in particular, the maturity level of European (sovereign) clouds. Questions such as “Which European cloud providers are there, and how well do their services measure up to those of the hyperscalers?” are frequently heard.

The Dutch municipality of Nijmegen, with its nearly 200,000 residents, wanted to replace its outdated on-premises data platform. The new data platform was intended to meet high level requirements for data security and privacy. With its ease of use, it was also meant to serve as a blueprint for other municipalities in the region. Those in charge asked themselves how they could build this sovereign data platform, free from dependence on U.S. hyperscalers, in a future-proof manner within the European legal framework, without compromising on security and scalability.

The municipality therefore sought a European, sovereign cloud as a foundation. But sovereignty wasn’t everything for Nijmegen, the cloud also needed to offer extensive functionality for modern cloud management. This includes, for example, a range of managed services (Infrastructure as Code, Identity & Access Management, open-source databases) as well as support and security. 

Nijmegen commissioned the experienced consultants at T&T Data Consultancy to develop a concept for the data platform, including the selection of the most suitable European cloud. T&T Data Consultancy is a Dutch consulting firm specializing in data analysis and artificial intelligence, headquartered in Utrecht. The company helps organizations transition to data-driven work and sustainably embed the use of data analytics and AI within the organization.

T&T Data Consultancy analyzed the European cloud market. The independent consultants documented their findings in their study „Comparison of European Cloud Providers – Data Sovereignty in Practice”. The paper serves as a practical decision-making guide for selecting a European cloud.  

The architecture team of Nijmegen placed a high priority on the use of open source and simple, seamless integration with other data applications within the platform. Furthermore, the data needed to be easily searchable, and the data origin as well as dependencies between data sets had to be presented transparently and simply. Authentication was to be handled via SSO (Single Sign-On). T&T Data Consultancy decided to use OpenMetadata as the data catalog for this purpose.

Based on the requirements profile and the choice of data catalog, a technical architecture was developed that can also be easily deployed in other municipalities. In the hub-and-spoke model, a shared virtual private cloud serves as the central hub. It is connected to the existing on-premises environments via private connections.

Each municipality receives its own data lake based on S3-compatible object storage, as well as a (managed) PostgreSQL database that serves as a data warehouse. An API provides access to the data warehouse. The data catalog itself uses four components: another PostgreSQL database for metadata, a Cloud Search Service, a VM running OpenMetadata, and a VM running Airflow. 

T&T Data Consultancy developed a criteria catalog with 24 topics that reflect the practical requirements of many cloud users. The catalog can serve as a blueprint for selecting a cloud provider. The consultants used the criteria set to compare five European clouds for the city of Nijmegen: OVHCloud, Scaleway, STACKIT, T Cloud Public, and UpCloud.

Based on the analysis, Nijmegen tested T Cloud Public and Scaleway. In the proof of concept, T Cloud Public emerged as the clear winner. The city made its decision and modernized its data platform with T Cloud Public: the scalable, open-source-based, sovereign platform is already live and offers the city strong prospects for the future.