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  • sam_lowry_(4)

Ask HN: Anyone working on bringing software back from US clouds?

10 points sam_lowry_ | 11 comments | 28 Aug 25 13:40 UTC | HN request time: 1.486s | source | bottom

I am a freelancer from EU and I want to specialize in migrating software back on-prem or to traditional EU hosting providers.

However, with all the talk about Digital Sovereignty and Strategic Autonomy, I found few real projects that require engineering expertise.

I feel like everyone is just trying to squeeze money from EU funds on this hot topic, but none actually believes such migrations can be done, so all money is consumed on policy issues, not the actual work.

We are collectively sitting on our hands, waiting until Trump administration is over and relations between EU and US are back to normal.

Are there people out there really doing such migrations? Technology associations that provide support? Businesses that grow in that niche?

1. petralithic ◴[28 Aug 25 14:31 UTC] No.45052640[source]▶
Have you read these articles by DHH, of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp fame? He's also based in the EU so it might be helpful to read.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47...

https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb

https://world.hey.com/dhh/our-switch-to-kamal-is-complete-8e...

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2. sam_lowry_ ◴[28 Aug 25 14:44 UTC] No.45052827[source]▶
These articles provide motivation and example, but again, this is just one relatively small company.

Where are thousands of thousands of others following lead?

replies(1): >>45053380 #
3. gooodvibes ◴[28 Aug 25 15:24 UTC] No.45053380{3}[source]▶
They're not. Most companies, teams, people don't care about this.
4. runjake ◴[28 Aug 25 16:30 UTC] No.45054132[source]▶
I believe DHH is US-based. He went back to the EU during the Malibu fires, but I believe he's back in California now.

To be more useful, I hear great things about Hetzner amongst my EU engineer friends.

https://www.hetzner.com/

replies(1): >>45061089 #
5. msarrel ◴[29 Aug 25 00:09 UTC] No.45058448[source]▶
Check out Tensor9. They package cloud apps to run on prem.

Pulling AI workloads out of the cloud is gaining traction. There could be a lot of upside for someone who develops the skills needed to move cloud apps on prem or in a privately controlled cloud.

6. sam_lowry_ ◴[29 Aug 25 07:06 UTC] No.45061089{3}[source]▶
I've been using Hetzner for the last 15 years and even did a migration from a cloud provider to Hetzner once.

It was for financial reasons mostly, although HR considerations like the need to keep good engineers happy played a role.

Still, such projects were sparse and are even more rare now.

replies(1): >>45066941 #
7. austin-cheney ◴[29 Aug 25 09:03 UTC] No.45061826[source]▶
Most of the software I write now is for personal use and household automation. This software does things unrelated to content and/or data. It’s all about automation, user experience, and solving real problems that I actually have. As such I don’t really need cloud hosting for any of it.
8. runjake ◴[29 Aug 25 17:26 UTC] No.45066941{4}[source]▶
What did you think of your Hetzner experience? If it's glowing, what were two things that bugged you?
replies(1): >>45073629 #
9. adamcharnock ◴[29 Aug 25 17:42 UTC] No.45067163[source]▶
Oh wow, this is exactly what we're doing. We've been doing this for a while, but since last year we've gone all-in on it. See: https://lithus.eu

We saw that companies were hesitant to deploy on bare metal because of: risk of project failure, need to retrain, need to hire, and general fear of unmanaged hardware.

So we did the math and realised that for half the price of AWS we could provide the infra /and/ provide the DevOps engineering time to support their software developers. We'd already built the IP to do this over the proceeding years anyway.

So we're definitely a services company rather than a product company, but we are actually doing this in a really meaningful way. We migrate people out of AWS (et al), then operate their infra and become their DevOps team. And now we have some very happy customers!

Always happy to chat if anyone is interested – adam@ domain.

10. sam_lowry_ ◴[30 Aug 25 10:59 UTC] No.45073629{5}[source]▶
My take is that Hetzner has more features than AWS in a way that defies the learned helplesness of AWS engineers.

For instance a huge feature is the ability to move prettty much all resources between business accounts.