I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

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What exactly is your goal in doing this? What has it brought you?

Running microservices on Hetzner is a risky move.

Their direct internet connections rarely go down, but links between servers in their internal network suffer from intermittent failures. if you make your service reliable enough to be able to run on a single node, you could have built a monolith in the first place.

A lot of people are over romanticizing on Hetzner. The hard truth is that Hetzner is a great provider for bare metal machines and extremely competitive pricing, but it's extremely demanding to run production workloads there without a dedicated infra guy. Claude won't wake up in the middle of the night solving the things helped you provision in an acceptable timeframe. If you are serious about your product SLOs, hyperscales shine, and you can only accept the "cloud tax".

In conclusion from the `What you realistically can't avoid` section is that running entirely on non american services will never happen.

Unless some entity pours hundreds of billions (trillions?) of euros into solving this over multiple decades there will be no way to replace google ads and sign in with google/apple. The AI part seems to be the easiest thing to solve in the list, that says something.

I've witnessed quite a few attempts in this regard, and they're truly admirable. Although Gitea's trademark and domain are controlled by China.

From a geopolitical perspective, such attempts don't hold much significance. The EU's future doesn't lie here either. It lies more in media control, profiting from balancing between the US, China, and Russia, and even continuing to extract raw materials from former colonies through low prices or unfair contracts. This may not be glorious, but it's what's been happening all along. A vast consumer market, the influence of values, comprehensive soft power, cultural control and integration of large numbers of immigrants, and so on. "Made in EU" will never succeed.

Per "Choose Boring Technology" [0]:

> Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while... If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use service discovery tech that’s existed for a year or less, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to write your own database, oh god, you’re in trouble.

From my POV, the author spent their innovation tokens on a political commitment. I would not recommend this path to someone starting a company. It's hard enough already.

Also, many American companies that might have been useful to the author were founded by Europeans, e.g. GitLab. There's plenty of European talent for making widely adopted infrastructure. If those companies aren't in Europe, it's worth asking why [1].

[0] https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-europe-doesnt-have-a-te...