#14 EU Cloud Alternatives - Scaleway

February 27, 2026 · 00:53:45 · Krisztian Fischer & Toby Sears

Show Notes

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian kick off an ongoing series exploring the EU cloud and software stack. Following a previous episode on EU digital sovereignty, they have set themselves a challenge: build their side projects entirely on EU-based services. This episode covers hands-on experience with Forgejo for source code management, Scaleway as a cloud provider, and Hanko for authentication. They share honest feedback on what works, what doesn't, and where the gaps are compared to the big American hyperscalers.

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Chapters

0:00 Introduction and the EU sovereignty challenge

1:48 Finding EU alternatives: european-alternatives.eu

3:47 Looking for a GitHub replacement

5:50 Forgejo: the open-source Gitea fork

8:27 What works in Forgejo and what doesn't

10:46 Hosting Forgejo on Scaleway

13:48 The gap between self-hosting and a managed service

15:18 Scaleway overview: regions, services and Terraform support

20:35 Scaleway serverless functions and containers

25:02 Service-to-service authentication

28:34 Deploying Forgejo, databases and runners on Scaleway

36:04 Logging, metrics and Cockpit observability

40:27 Scaleway regions: Amsterdam, Paris, Warsaw

42:25 IAM limitations and enterprise considerations

44:14 Hanko: EU-native user authentication

48:32 Comparing EU stack total cost vs AWS plus Datadog

50:05 What's next: OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak

Technologies Mentioned

- EU alternatives: https://european-alternatives.eu

- Codeberg: https://codeberg.org

- Forgejo: https://forgejo.org

- Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/

- OVHcloud: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/

- UpCloud: https://upcloud.com

- Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com

- Elastx: https://elastx.se/en

- Hanko: https://www.hanko.io