Object Storage

What each cloud calls it

Pricing

• Storage list prices are broadly competitive with S3 Standard. Scaleway and OVHcloud are often cheaper at scale, particularly for steady-state archive workloads.
• Egress is where European object storage shines. Scaleway includes a generous egress allowance per month. OVHcloud charges no egress to its own services. STACKIT and IONOS include egress in regional bundles. Compare to S3, where every byte leaving the region is charged.
• Request pricing (PUT, GET, LIST) exists on all providers but is generally lower than S3. For workloads dominated by request volume rather than stored bytes, this can meaningfully change the bill.
• No retrieval fees for warm storage on most European providers. Glacier and Deep Archive retrieval fees on AWS can dwarf the storage cost when audits or recovery happen; the warm tiers on European providers do not have this gotcha.

Migration considerations

• S3 API compatibility is the baseline. Scaleway, OVHcloud, STACKIT, IONOS, and Hetzner all expose S3-compatible APIs, so most SDKs and tools (boto3, aws-cli, rclone, MinIO clients) work after pointing at a new endpoint. Compatibility is broad but not total. Specialised features like S3 Object Lambda, multi-region access points, and Glacier deep-archive lifecycles have no direct equivalent.
• Egress costs and the migration itself. The single biggest cost of moving large datasets out of AWS is egress. For multi-terabyte migrations, plan a one-time transfer using rclone or a tool like AWS Snowball before deprecating the source bucket. Some European providers will reimburse migration egress in commercial conversations, so it is worth asking before you commit to a transfer plan.
• Storage classes. AWS offers five tiers (S3 Standard, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier, Deep Archive). Most European providers offer two or three tiers (hot plus cold archive). Lifecycle policies that step through five tiers need to be flattened.
• Bucket policies and IAM integration. S3 bucket policies and AWS IAM are tightly coupled. European providers offer their own IAM but the policy language differs. Pre-signed URLs, server-side encryption with KMS keys, and access logging all need re-implementation, not lift-and-shift.
• Eventual vs strong consistency. S3 has been strongly consistent since 2020. Most European providers also offer strong read-after-write consistency, but a handful of edge cases (cross-region replication, listing) can behave differently. Check your application assumptions if it relies on listing right after write.

Further reading

• Why European companies are migrating away from US cloud giants→
• AWS is offering a "Sovereign Cloud" for Europe. But is it actually sovereign?→