The study also considers future scenarios. If 15% of this spending were retained within the European economy by 2035, around 500,000 direct, indirect, and induced jobs would be created, benefiting the European economy.

80% of total spending on cloud software and services for business use in Europe went to US companies, representing a volume of €265 billion.

This spending, relating exclusively to cloud software and services for business use, represents approximately 2 million direct, indirect, and induced jobs in the US.

k zei tegen hen: vraag al je bedrijven om een kopie van hun data op een Europese cloud te bewaren, voor de zekerheid. Dat is minimale beveiliging. Je kunt nog steeds met AWS werken als je wilt, maar zorg dat je een kopie hebt onder Europese jurisdictie.’

Hij raakt teleurgesteld over hoe de Europese bedrijven zich opstellen, vooral cloudaanbieders als Herztner, Leaseweb (Nederlands), OVH en Ionos. „Je zou verwachten dat die voorop zouden lopen in de strijd. Maar in plaats daarvan zeggen ze ‘Het ligt niet aan ons dat mensen onze spullen niet kopen’.”

En dus probeert de NextCloud-topman de gefragmenteerde Europese ict-industrie in beweging te krijgen. Op 4 maart pakt Karlitschek het vliegtuig naar Milaan voor een EuroStack-bijeenkomst met vooral Europese ondernemers. Het is de bedoeling daar stappen te zetten richting een gezamenlijk Europees ict-aanbod. Ze spreken er een eerste stap af naar een gezamenlijke Europese standaard voor clouds.

I'm not advocating that everyone should self-host everything. But the pendulum has swung too far toward managed services. There's a large sweet spot where self-hosting makes perfect sense, and more teams should seriously consider it. Start small. If you're paying more than $200/month for RDS, spin up a test server and migrate a non-critical database. You might be surprised by how straightforward it is. The future of infrastructure is almost certainly more hybrid than it's been recently: managed services where they add genuine value, self-hosted where they're just expensive abstractions. Postgres often falls into the latter category. Footnotes They're either just hosting a vanilla postgres instance that's tied to the deployed hardware config, or doing something opaque with edge deploys and sharding. In the latter case they near guarantee your DB will stay highly available but costs can quickly spiral out of control. ↩ Maybe up to billions at this point. ↩ Even on otherwise absolutely snail speed hardware. ↩ This was Jeff Bezos's favorite phrase during the early AWS days, and it stuck. ↩ Similar options include OVH, Hetzner dedicated instances, or even bare metal from providers like Equinix. ↩ AWS RDS & S3 has had several major outages over the years. The most memorable was the 2017 US-East-1 outage that took down half the internet. ↩

When self-hosting doesn't make sense I'd argue self-hosting is the right choice for basically everyone, with the few exceptions at both ends of the extreme: If you're just starting out in software & want to get something working quickly with vibe coding, it's easier to treat Postgres as just another remote API that you can call from your single deployed app If you're a really big company and are reaching the scale where you need trained database engineers to just work on your stack, you might get economies of scale by just outsourcing that work to a cloud company that has guaranteed talent in that area. The second full freight salaries come into play, outsourcing looks a bit cheaper. Regulated workloads (PCI-DSS, FedRAMP, HIPAA, etc.) sometimes require a managed platform with signed BAAs or explicit compliance attestations.

The real operational complexity

I helped prove this to myself when I migrated off RDS. I took a pg_dump of my RDS instance, restored it to a self-hosted server with identical specs, and ran my application's test suite. Performance was identical. In some cases, it was actually better because I could tune parameters that RDS locks down.

But the actual database engine? It's the same Postgres running the same SQL queries with the same performance characteristics.

The value proposition is operational: they handle the monitoring, alerting, backup verification, and incident response. It's also a production ready configuration at minute zero of your first deployment.

For the most part managed database services aren't running some magical proprietary technology. They're just running the same open-source Postgres you can download with some operational tooling wrapped around it. Take AWS RDS. Under the hood, it's: Standard Postgres compiled with some AWS-specific monitoring hooks A custom backup system using EBS snapshots Automated configuration management via Chef/Puppet/Ansible Load balancers and connection pooling (PgBouncer) Monitoring integration with CloudWatch Automated failover scripting

Fast forward to 2025 and I hope the pendulum might be swinging back. RDS pricing has grown considerably more aggressive. A db.r6g.xlarge instance (4 vCPUs, 32GB RAM) now costs $328/month before you add storage, backups, or multi-AZ deployment. For that price, you could rent a dedicated server with 32 cores and 256GB of RAM.

The real shift happened around 2015 when cloud adoption accelerated. Companies started to view any infrastructure management as "undifferentiated heavy lifting"4. Running your own database became associated with legacy thinking. A new orthodoxy emerged of focusing on your application logic and letting AWS handle the infrastructure.