If you are going to selfhost your git repos, i recommend trying forgejo instead of gitlab. i got a gitlab instance running and its pretty wasteful when it comes to RAM and CPU. It takes 2GB for an instance where nothing is really going on. I also like that behind forgejo is a non-profit organisation.
Part of why the European switch works, at least from the outside, is that GDPR gives “European service” a concrete meaning: there is a shared legal baseline for what companies can do with your data. Without that, "hosted in Europe" would mostly just mean a server location.
I'm in Korea, so I keep wondering what the East Asian version of this would look like. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are not wildly different from Europe on privacy law or public expectations around data, but there is nothing here that plays the EU's role. “East Asia-based” still sounds like geography, not a promise.
Korea has Naver Cloud and a few others, but moving from AWS to a local platform giant does not automatically feel like sovereignty. It can just move the lock-in closer to home. What I want, and have not really found in this region, is pretty boring: clear rules, usable developer tools, and enough scale to trust it for real projects.
FWIW, as a foreigner, EU law will give you significantly stronger protections than US law will. Honestly it's arguable that the GDPR gives stronger protections for US citizens than the US constitution and other US laws gives.
and yet even good old GDPR has plenty of internal bugs, e.g here in Sweden companies are allowed to store and sell personal data, without consent or right of withdrawal (I tried), because the courts have ruled that freedom of press takes priority over the right to be forgotten. NB companies that have nothing to do with press or journalism but in fact just monetize bulk data.
GDPR only regulates the storage and processing of personal data/ PII though.
What's also important (and I think more operationally relevant to a "european cloud") is a legal guarantee that governments will not snoop into private data. I forget the exact keywords but both the US and China have eavesdropping clauses on the companies within their jurisdiction.
Keyword for the US being CLOUD Act, which considers data stored in a European data center, but owned/operated by a US company on behalf of others (like a company in the EU), to be the US company's "business records", which they must be able to provide to the US government.
When I first clicked this article on the orange site, I got a Cloudflare error, which I found hilarious. Now, with Cloudflare working I can read why they chose to stay with the American CDN.
I wish they moved. It's another opportunity to remind people that CloudFlare protects ddos-for-hire companies and paying them is effectively throwing money at protection racket.
Does anyone have any extensive experience with Scaleway? I found it really hard to find everything in their administration tools and was asked to upload identification to unlock the quota[1] from my account, which was a dealbreaker for me.
drrobotic | 16 hours ago
If you are going to selfhost your git repos, i recommend trying forgejo instead of gitlab. i got a gitlab instance running and its pretty wasteful when it comes to RAM and CPU. It takes 2GB for an instance where nothing is really going on. I also like that behind forgejo is a non-profit organisation.
ocramz | 15 hours ago
come to think of it, a git remote could totally be serverless.
Irene | 10 hours ago
absolutely. this is the first thing I usually tell people to do. web front ends are collaboration tools, not essential to hosting.
wink | 2 hours ago
gitosis was pretty popular back in the day... and others existed
hongminhee | 9 hours ago
Part of why the European switch works, at least from the outside, is that GDPR gives “European service” a concrete meaning: there is a shared legal baseline for what companies can do with your data. Without that, "hosted in Europe" would mostly just mean a server location.
I'm in Korea, so I keep wondering what the East Asian version of this would look like. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are not wildly different from Europe on privacy law or public expectations around data, but there is nothing here that plays the EU's role. “East Asia-based” still sounds like geography, not a promise.
Korea has Naver Cloud and a few others, but moving from AWS to a local platform giant does not automatically feel like sovereignty. It can just move the lock-in closer to home. What I want, and have not really found in this region, is pretty boring: clear rules, usable developer tools, and enough scale to trust it for real projects.
ianloic | 8 hours ago
FWIW, as a foreigner, EU law will give you significantly stronger protections than US law will. Honestly it's arguable that the GDPR gives stronger protections for US citizens than the US constitution and other US laws gives.
kablamooo | 30 minutes ago
I don’t think it does really. When they wanted info on telegram in France they just arrested their CEO and coerced him to do what they wanted.
ocramz | 2 hours ago
and yet even good old GDPR has plenty of internal bugs, e.g here in Sweden companies are allowed to store and sell personal data, without consent or right of withdrawal (I tried), because the courts have ruled that freedom of press takes priority over the right to be forgotten. NB companies that have nothing to do with press or journalism but in fact just monetize bulk data.
ocramz | 4 hours ago
GDPR only regulates the storage and processing of personal data/ PII though.
What's also important (and I think more operationally relevant to a "european cloud") is a legal guarantee that governments will not snoop into private data. I forget the exact keywords but both the US and China have eavesdropping clauses on the companies within their jurisdiction.
enpo | 4 hours ago
Keyword for the US being CLOUD Act, which considers data stored in a European data center, but owned/operated by a US company on behalf of others (like a company in the EU), to be the US company's "business records", which they must be able to provide to the US government.
pyfisch | 18 hours ago
When I first clicked this article on the orange site, I got a Cloudflare error, which I found hilarious. Now, with Cloudflare working I can read why they chose to stay with the American CDN.
viraptor | 10 hours ago
I wish they moved. It's another opportunity to remind people that CloudFlare protects ddos-for-hire companies and paying them is effectively throwing money at protection racket.
manfred | 39 minutes ago
Does anyone have any extensive experience with Scaleway? I found it really hard to find everything in their administration tools and was asked to upload identification to unlock the quota[1] from my account, which was a dealbreaker for me.
[1] https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/organizations-and-projects/how-to/manage-quotas/
ocramz | 15 hours ago
[OT] I love the mouseover effect they created for their links. So original!