European cloud providers are closer to parity than you might think

For a working production stack of the kind a 50-to-500-person regulated business actually runs, the parity gap is much smaller than the narrative often suggests. The Cirran service mapping compares 23 service categories across AWS, Azure, GCP and five European providers (Scaleway, OVHcloud, STACKIT, IONOS, Hetzner). Reading the table top-to-bottom is a faster way to test the assumption than any further argument here.

The rest of this article walks through what the table actually shows: where parity has arrived, where the European side has overtaken, and where the real gaps remain.

The assumption is two years stale

Most procurement and audit conversations about cloud sovereignty still operate on a 2023 picture of the European cloud market. In that picture, OVHcloud sells dedicated servers, Scaleway has a few useful pieces, and STACKIT and IONOS are too new to count. Anything beyond compute and Postgres requires a custom build, runs on a different operating model, or ships with rough edges an enterprise tooling team will not absorb.

That picture was reasonable in 2023. It's no longer where the market is. Scaleway's managed services now cover serverless, S3-compatible storage, managed Kubernetes, multiple managed databases, generative AI inference, observability, IAM and secrets. OVHcloud has done the same in parallel.

STACKIT has gone from announcement to a credible managed-platform offering with BSI C5 certification. IONOS has built out a comparable stack. Hetzner remains narrower in product offering but has added object storage and load balancing to a strong compute and networking baseline.

The independent comparison maintained at eualternative.eu reaches the same conclusion. Across the categories that matter for a typical mid-market production stack, parity is closer than the standard procurement conversation assumes.

Where parity is real

The categories where European providers offer matching services to AWS, Azure, and GCP cover most of what a production application actually depends on. Compute instances run on every provider, with ARM64 options now available from Scaleway and OVHcloud alongside Graviton, Cobalt and Axion on the US side. Managed Kubernetes is universal: EKS, AKS, GKE on the US side; Managed Kubernetes Service, Kubernetes Kapsule, Kubernetes Engine, Managed Kubernetes on the European side.

Object storage runs on S3-compatible APIs across every European provider in the comparison, which means most existing tooling (boto3, aws-cli, rclone, MinIO clients) works after re-pointing the endpoint. Managed PostgreSQL and MySQL are available from every European provider with a managed database product. In-memory caching ships as managed Redis or Valkey from OVHcloud, Scaleway, STACKIT and IONOS.

Virtual private networks, content delivery, monitoring, identity and access management, secrets management, load balancing, and web application firewalls all have credible European equivalents. The naming differs, the billing models differ, SDK quality and Terraform-provider coverage are uneven. But for the workloads on which the typical European mid-market business runs, the categories are covered.

The service mapping table lays the comparison out cell by cell. Reading it is the fastest way to test the assumption against your own stack.

Where the European side has actually overtaken

In two categories, the European side is now ahead of where the standard narrative assumes it is.

The first is hosted AI inference. Every major European cloud now ships a managed-model service: AI Endpoints on OVHcloud, Generative APIs on Scaleway, AI Model Serving on STACKIT, AI Model Hub on IONOS. These products serve open-weight models from European-hosted infrastructure with European data-residency guarantees.

AWS, Azure and GCP have larger model catalogues, but on the question European boards are actually asking - "can we run AI inference workloads under EU jurisdiction without rebuilding from raw GPUs" - the European answer is now yes.

The second area is the structural pricing position. Egress is the cleanest example: AWS, Azure and GCP charge for every byte leaving the region, while Scaleway includes a generous monthly egress allowance and OVHcloud charges no egress to its own services. STACKIT and IONOS bundle regional egress into their managed offerings. Cross-instance traffic within a region is free on most European providers, so architectures that were engineered to minimise egress costs on AWS can often be simplified.

Sovereignty certifications are a third advantage and a structural one. SecNumCloud (held by Scaleway and OVHcloud in their qualifying regions), BSI C5 (held by STACKIT, IONOS, and Hetzner), and HDS for healthcare workloads exist precisely to qualify European-operated infrastructure for jurisdictions where US control-plane access is a regulatory problem. The US hyperscalers cannot match them by definition.

The honest gaps

The case is stronger when the gaps are named openly.

The largest gap is managed serverless functions. Scaleway offers Serverless Functions and Serverless Containers; the other European providers do not. For workloads built heavily on AWS Lambda, and Lambda is the big one with broad adoption across the mid-market, this narrows the European options to Scaleway or requires the workload to be rebuilt on managed Kubernetes or container instances. That is a real cost in some migrations.

The second gap is managed key-value databases of the DynamoDB shape. No European provider in the comparison offers a direct equivalent. Workloads built on DynamoDB usually migrate to managed PostgreSQL, or to a self-managed Cassandra or Scylla setup on European compute. This is mostly an architectural rewrite question, not a "buy the equivalent product" question.

The third gap is managed analytical data warehousing. AWS Redshift, Azure Synapse and Google BigQuery have no direct European equivalent at the same scale; only OVHcloud's Data Platform addresses this category, and it is not a like-for-like replacement for BigQuery's scale. Most warehouse migrations end up on managed PostgreSQL with columnar extensions, on ClickHouse on dedicated compute, or on a self-managed Snowflake-on-European-storage approach.

The fourth gap is a long tail of US-specific niche services such as S3 Object Lambda, Cloud Spanner, BigLake, DynamoDB Streams, or Cosmos DB's multi-model planes. These are real engineering surface for the teams that use them. They are also exactly the services where the US providers' lock-in is most acute, which is why naming them explicitly matters during migration scoping.

What this changes about the migration question

The conclusion is not that European migration is a drop-in replacement. It is that the question being asked needs to change.

The 2023 question was "can European clouds do what we need?", and the answer for any non-trivial stack was often "not really, not all of it, not with the operational maturity we need." That question is increasingly the wrong one in 2026.

The 2026 question is "what is the right migration plan for this specific stack?" The answer depends on what services the workload actually uses, what the contractual and regulatory drivers are, what the timeline allows, and what the team's tolerance for architectural change looks like. These are concrete planning questions, not feasibility questions.

For most production stacks built on a mainstream service set (compute, managed Kubernetes or containers, S3-compatible storage, managed PostgreSQL or MySQL, in-memory cache, VPC, monitoring, IAM), the migration is more straightforward than the narrative suggests. For stacks built heavily on Lambda, on DynamoDB, on BigQuery, or on US-specific niche services, the migration requires architectural decisions that need to happen before any move. Either way, the conversation has moved on from whether the European clouds can do it.

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