Often there are proprietary solution to proprietary problems you would otherwise not have in the first place
Vendor lock-in is a real-problem: even if there are no political issues, it is a business risk because they can charge you whatever they want. People building vendor locked applications are making a short-sighted decision - it benefits developers more than businesses.
A well-built application should run seamlessly on any Linux-based system wihtout unecessary dependencies on proprietary ecosystems.
It was never safe for any government to move any secrets to any cloud. The fact that the US government is okay with doing this with its own secrets surprises me to this day. You have no secrets from the person who owns your hardware. This fact conveys information. Namely, how tightly bound these supposedly independent services like AWS are with the government itself. There are already european alternatives it might be time to step up the game. Europe has done this before. Airbus did not exist but now it is the best aircraft maker since Boeing decided to retire all their senion engineers in favor of quick profits. Europe created Airbus, they can do the same with a new Cloud provider.
Other developed countries are less comfortable because all the major cloud providers are US-owned companies and the NSA has a very, very long history of using US companies as information security weapons. Same for the German cloud, it’s Azure Stack but operated by a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.
data residency is not data sovereignty
This distinction matters tremendously. Having your data physically stored in European data centers means little if the software stack, encryption keys, and administrative controls remain vulnerable to foreign influence.
For true sovereignty, Europe needs to invest in the entire technology stack - from hardware to operating systems to application platforms. Until then, we’ll continue to face this uncomfortable dependence on systems we cannot fully control.
In the meantime, those of us building critical infrastructure need to prioritize open protocols, containerization, and Infrastructure-as-Code practices that maintain portability. It’s more work upfront, but provides the flexibility to migrate when better alternatives emerge.