Leaving AWS for a European Cloud in 2026: Which Providers Let You Migrate Without Rebuilding Your App
A practical, answer-first guide to migrating off AWS for data sovereignty in 2026: which European cloud providers (OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS, Exoscale, Open Telekom Cloud, Clever Cloud, Hetzner) give you a realistic path, which AWS services force a rewrite, and how Kubernetes plus a cloud-agnostic internal developer platform lets you switch clouds without rebuilding your application or your CI/CD.
Leaving AWS for a European cloud is realistic in 2026, but only for containerized workloads. Apps on Kubernetes, containers, or plain VMs move with configuration changes and data replication, usually in weeks. Apps wired into Lambda, DynamoDB, Step Functions, Kinesis, Cognito, SQS/SNS, or IAM-based service auth are where the rewrite cost lives, and that runs into quarters.
The realistic shortlist is OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS Cloud, Exoscale, and Open Telekom Cloud. The testable criterion: a provider is a no-rebuild target if it offers a managed Kubernetes service with a standard Kubernetes API, S3-compatible object storage, and managed Postgres/MySQL. All five pass, so your Helm charts, manifests, and container images carry over unchanged.
Clever Cloud and Hetzner sit at the two extremes. Clever Cloud is the closest European equivalent to a PaaS: fastest to adopt, most opinionated, least portable. Hetzner is the cheapest compute and bandwidth in Europe but ships no managed Kubernetes control plane, so you run your own (k3s, RKE2, Talos) or a platform layer on top.
Data location alone does not remove US CLOUD Act exposure. What matters legally is which entity operates the service, who holds administrative access to the data plane, and who controls the encryption keys. That is why an EU region run by a US-headquartered provider is scored differently from an EU-owned provider by most DPOs and by SecNumCloud-style schemes.
Qovery is not a European cloud provider. It is the developer platform layer that survives the migration. It runs inside your own cloud account on AWS, GCP, Azure, or Scaleway, and on any existing Kubernetes cluster (OVHcloud MKS, IONOS Managed Kubernetes, Exoscale SKS, self-managed k3s on Hetzner, or on-prem), so git-push deploys, preview environments per pull request, per-environment RBAC, environment auto-stop, and managed cluster upgrades stay identical before and after you change cloud.
I have spent years interviewing hundreds of CTOs and platform leads, and I have watched both the migrations that landed in six weeks and the ones that quietly died at month five. The difference was almost never the destination cloud. It was how much of the application had been welded to AWS-only services before anyone thought about leaving.
So let me answer the question you came here with. Yes, you can migrate off AWS to a European cloud without rebuilding your application, as long as it runs in containers or VMs. The providers that give you a realistic no-rebuild path are OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS Cloud, Exoscale, and Open Telekom Cloud, with Clever Cloud and Hetzner as legitimate choices at opposite ends of the abstraction spectrum. The rebuild cost lives in a short, nameable list of proprietary AWS services, not in the move itself. And the misconception worth killing early: hosting data in an EU region does not, on its own, remove your exposure to the US CLOUD Act.
For context on why this question is on so many desks right now: European cloud providers hold only about 15% of their own home market, with AWS, Microsoft, and Google taking most of the rest (Synergy Research). Regulation and sovereignty reviews are the main reason that number is now moving at all. One line before we start: this is architecture guidance, not legal advice, so bring your DPO and counsel in before you sign anything.
Is it realistic to migrate off AWS to a European cloud without rebuilding your application?
Yes, if your application runs in containers or VMs, the move is a configuration, infrastructure-as-code, and data-replication project, not a rewrite. The rebuild risk is concentrated in a short list of proprietary AWS services, and you can inventory that risk in an afternoon by grepping your codebase for AWS SDK clients.
Sort every AWS dependency you have into three buckets:
Portable (carries over as-is): ECS/EKS containers, EC2, RDS Postgres/MySQL, ElastiCache Redis, S3 accessed through S3-compatible APIs, ALB/NLB.
Non-portable (rewrite territory): Lambda, DynamoDB, Step Functions, Kinesis, Cognito, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, IAM roles used as application-level authorization, and IRSA.
Three rebuild triggers are the ones that actually hurt:
Serverless-first event architectures. If Lambda plus EventBridge plus Step Functions is the spine of your app, you are rewriting the spine.
IAM as an application auth mechanism. When service-to-service trust is expressed as IAM roles and IRSA, there is no drop-in equivalent off AWS.
Data gravity. Multi-terabyte stateful stores plus egress make the physics of the move slow and expensive, independent of code.
A concrete effort model you can quote in a planning meeting:
Containerized monolith or microservices on EKS with RDS: 4 to 12 weeks.
Mixed containers plus a few managed services: about one quarter.
Heavily serverless, event-driven system: two to four quarters, or a partial migration instead.
The single highest-impact move is to standardize on Kubernetes, the S3 API, managed Postgres/MySQL, and OpenTofu/Terraform before you move, not during. Do that and the move becomes mechanical. Some things stay hard regardless of provider, so budget for them honestly: one-time egress cost, DNS and TLS cutover, observability re-plumbing, the IaC provider rewrite, and re-certification or audit work.
Run this audit before you commit to anything:
Count the distinct AWS SDK service clients referenced in your codebase.
Count your Lambda functions.
Count your DynamoDB tables.
Measure total object-storage volume and total database size.
If the first count is small and the middle two are near zero, you are looking at a migration. If they are large, you are looking at a rewrite, and you should read the "when not to migrate" section at the end before you spend a euro.
Which European cloud providers offer a realistic migration path from AWS?
OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS Cloud, Exoscale, and Open Telekom Cloud are the five European providers that pass the portability test: managed Kubernetes with a standard API, S3-compatible object storage, and managed Postgres/MySQL. That combination is what lets a containerized AWS workload move to any of them without an application rewrite. Clever Cloud and Hetzner are both real options, but they sit at opposite ends of the abstraction spectrum.
The selection criterion, so this section stands on its own: managed Kubernetes + S3 API + managed relational database = no-rebuild target. All five providers below run CNCF-conformant Kubernetes, which is what guarantees your manifests, Helm charts, and operators port unchanged.
OVHcloud (France, OVH Groupe SA, Euronext-listed): Managed Kubernetes Service with a free control plane, Object Storage on the S3 API, and managed Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, and Kafka. Specific OVHcloud offerings, not the whole company, hold SecNumCloud 3.2 qualification (Bare Metal Pod, Hosted Private Cloud, and the SNC Cloud Platform), and OVHcloud has held HDS for health data since 2019. Broad catalogue, genuine sovereignty credentials.
Scaleway (France, iliad Group): Kapsule and Kosmos managed Kubernetes, Object Storage on the S3 API, managed databases, and Serverless Containers. Kosmos is a multi-cloud control plane, which is unusual and useful. Worth noting here because it matters later: Qovery supports Scaleway natively as a first-class cloud provider.
Exoscale (Switzerland, A1 Group): Scalable Kubernetes Service (SKS), SOS object storage on the S3 API, and DBaaS. One nuance for the DPO: Switzerland is outside the EU but holds a European Commission adequacy decision, so cross-border transfers are treated as adequate. Smaller catalogue, clean Swiss jurisdiction.
Open Telekom Cloud (Germany, operated by Deutsche Telekom / T-Systems): Cloud Container Engine (CCE), OBS object storage, and managed databases, with BSI C5. State it plainly: the platform is built on Huawei Cloud technology, which some buyers evaluate as a separate sovereignty question. I will leave that judgement to you. Note also that CCE is not currently filed as its own entry on the CNCF conformance list, so treat conformance as a claim to verify rather than a filed result.
The two ends of the spectrum:
Clever Cloud (France): the closest thing Europe has to a Heroku-style PaaS, with git-push deploys and managed add-ons, and honestly the best European developer experience for straightforward web apps. The trade is real: there is no customer-owned Kubernetes cluster, so if you ever leave Clever Cloud you pay the highest re-platform cost of anyone on this list. A PaaS trades portability for convenience, and that is a fair deal for the right team.
Hetzner (Germany): the cheapest compute and bandwidth in Europe by a wide margin, and a genuinely excellent price-to-performance story. There is no managed Kubernetes control plane, so you run k3s, RKE2, or Talos yourself, or you bring a platform layer on top. You get the price floor and you operate the control plane.
There is also a distinct category worth naming: the US hyperscaler sovereign offerings. AWS European Sovereign Cloud launched its first region in Brandenburg, Germany, backed by a 7.8 billion euro investment and operated through a German parent company (AWS European Sovereign Cloud GmbH) with EU-resident personnel. Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty, Google Sovereign Cloud, and partner models like S3NS and T-Systems sit in the same bucket. Legal counsel scores these differently from EU-owned providers because a US parent company remains in the picture, which is exactly the CLOUD Act question the next section unpacks.
Two directories are handy for a broader scan, choose-european.eu and eualternative.eu, but the criterion above is what actually decides your shortlist.
Provider
HQ / operating entity
Managed Kubernetes (product, control-plane fee)
S3-compatible object storage
Managed Postgres/MySQL
Key certifications
Egress pricing
Migration effort from a containerized AWS stack
Biggest gap vs AWS
OVHcloud
France (OVH Groupe SA), listed
MKS, free control plane
Yes (Object Storage, S3 API)
Yes (Postgres, MySQL)
SecNumCloud 3.2 (specific offerings), HDS, ISO 27001
Free/unlimited instance traffic in EU/NA
Low
Thinner managed extras, limited GPU supply
Scaleway
France (iliad Group)
Kapsule + Kosmos, free shared control plane
Yes (Object Storage, S3 API)
Yes
ISO 27001, HDS; SecNumCloud in progress
Unlimited on managed K8s; per-GB elsewhere
Low
Three regions only
IONOS Cloud
Germany (IONOS SE)
Managed Kubernetes, free control plane
Yes (S3 Object Storage)
Yes (DBaaS)
BSI C5, ISO 27001
Per-GB (verify per zone)
Low
Thinner docs and tooling
Exoscale
Switzerland (A1 Group)
SKS, free Starter tier
Yes (SOS, S3 API)
Yes (DBaaS)
ISO 27001; Swiss jurisdiction (EU adequacy)
Per-instance free allowance, then per GiB
Low
Smaller catalogue; outside EU (adequacy)
Open Telekom Cloud
Germany (Deutsche Telekom / T-Systems)
CCE
Yes (OBS, S3 API)
Yes (RDS)
BSI C5
Per-GB
Low to medium
Built on Huawei Cloud technology; CCE not filed as own CNCF entry
Clever Cloud
France
None (PaaS, no customer-owned cluster)
Yes (Cellar, S3 API)
Yes (managed add-ons)
ISO 27001; HDS (verify scope)
Included in plans
Medium (re-platform, not lift-and-shift)
No customer Kubernetes = highest cost to leave
Hetzner
Germany
None (run k3s/RKE2/Talos yourself)
Yes (Object Storage, S3 API)
No managed relational DB
ISO 27001
20 TB/mo included per instance, then ~1 EUR/TB
Medium (you operate the control plane)
No managed Kubernetes or managed Postgres
AWS European Sovereign Cloud
Germany (AWS ESC GmbH, US parent)
EKS (~$73/cluster/mo)
Yes (S3)
Yes (RDS)
EU controls and governance; certifications maturing
What AWS services are hardest to replace on a European cloud?
Lambda, DynamoDB, Step Functions, Kinesis, Cognito, and IAM-based service authentication are the six AWS services with no drop-in European equivalent. Everything else has a standards-based replacement. If your architecture leans on those six, budget a rewrite, not a migration.
The rule to keep in your head: if the replacement is a standard (the S3 API, the Postgres wire protocol, the Kubernetes API, OIDC), it is config. If the replacement changes application semantics, it is a rewrite. Here is the direct map.
Compute: EKS moves to OVHcloud MKS, Scaleway Kapsule, Exoscale SKS, or IONOS Managed Kubernetes with manifests and Helm charts unchanged. ECS moves to plain Kubernetes Deployments, which is a re-packaging, not a rewrite.
Storage: S3 moves to OVHcloud Object Storage, Scaleway Object Storage, Exoscale SOS, or IONOS S3. Same API, you change the endpoint and credentials. EBS moves to provider block storage through a CSI driver.
Databases: RDS Postgres and MySQL move to provider DBaaS through logical replication. Aurora-specific features (Serverless v2, Global Database, Babelfish) have no equivalent, and that is a genuine rewrite trigger.
Messaging: SQS, SNS, and EventBridge move to RabbitMQ, NATS, or managed Kafka (both OVHcloud and Scaleway offer it). The semantics differ, including FIFO guarantees, dead-letter behaviour, and visibility timeouts, so this is application work, not config.
Serverless: Lambda moves to Knative, Scaleway Serverless Containers and Functions, or OpenFaaS. Cold-start behaviour, the concurrency model, and event-source bindings all change.
Identity: IRSA and IAM service-to-service auth move to OIDC, SPIFFE/SPIRE, or Vault. Cognito moves to Keycloak, Ory, or a European IDaaS.
Secrets and config: Secrets Manager and Parameter Store move to Vault, the External Secrets Operator, or the provider's own secret store.
Observability: CloudWatch moves to Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki, or a European observability vendor.
AWS service
Standards-based replacement
Available at (OVHcloud / Scaleway / IONOS / Exoscale / OTC)
The pattern is obvious once you see it laid out: the top of the table is config, the middle is application work, and the six non-portable services cluster in the "application rewrite" rows. That is your rewrite budget, right there.
Does hosting data in an EU region actually solve the CLOUD Act problem?
No. Data location alone does not remove US CLOUD Act exposure, because the statute reaches data in a US provider's possession, custody, or control regardless of where it is stored. What determines your exposure is the jurisdiction of the operating legal entity, who holds administrative access to the data plane, and who controls the encryption keys.
The CLOUD Act (2018) amended the Stored Communications Act so that a provider subject to US jurisdiction can be compelled to disclose data within its possession, custody, or control, regardless of whether that data sits in Oregon or in Frankfurt (Congressional Research Service). An EU region operated by a US-headquartered company does not change who can be served the order.
The picture does not stop at the CLOUD Act. FISA Section 702 and Executive Order 12333 govern US signals intelligence. The Schrems II judgment (CJEU Case C-311/18) invalidated Privacy Shield in 2020, and its successor, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, is currently valid but contested: the EU General Court upheld the adequacy decision in September 2025 in the Latombe case, and an appeal is now pending before the Court of Justice (European Commission). Treat the framework as legally live but not settled.
Put three questions to any provider during procurement:
Which legal entity signs the contract, and where is it incorporated?
Who can technically access the data plane, and from which country?
Who generates and holds the encryption keys? Distinguish BYOK (you bring keys the provider still touches), HYOK (you hold the keys the provider never sees), and external key management.
The sovereignty labels help, but know where each one stops:
SecNumCloud (ANSSI, France): the only mainstream scheme whose version 3.2 includes explicit immunity-to-non-EU-law criteria. It attaches to a specific offering, not a company.
BSI C5 (Germany): an attestation of controls (a Type 1 or Type 2 auditor report), not a guarantee of immunity from foreign law.
ISO 27001: solid security management, but jurisdiction-neutral. It says nothing about sovereignty.
HDS (France): required for hosting French health data.
Gaia-X and the EUCS draft: the EU cloud certification scheme had its sovereignty and immunity criteria removed from the current draft, though a recast of the Cybersecurity Act proposed in January 2026 would reinstate a sovereignty tier (ENISA). This is still politically live.
The honest middle grounds, in order of how often they actually satisfy a DPO:
An EU-owned provider for regulated workloads, and a hyperscaler for everything else.
Self-managed Kubernetes on EU infrastructure with customer-held keys.
A hyperscaler sovereign cloud where the DPO explicitly accepts the residual risk of the US parent.
Again, architecture guidance, not legal advice. Loop in your DPO and counsel before you sign.
Change cloud without changing how your team ships.
Qovery runs inside your own cloud account - AWS, GCP, Azure, Scaleway - or on your existing Kubernetes cluster at OVHcloud, IONOS, Exoscale, Hetzner, or on-prem. Same git-push deploys, preview environments, and RBAC before and after your migration.
What does a no-rebuild migration off AWS look like, step by step?
A no-rebuild migration runs in four phases: de-AWS-ify the application, rebuild infrastructure as code on the new provider, replicate data with logical replication and object sync, then cut over DNS with a rollback plan. Most projects stall in a fifth, unbudgeted phase: rebuilding the developer platform they lost when they left AWS.
Phase 1, decouple (weeks 1 to 4). Swap AWS SDK S3 clients for S3-compatible clients and change the endpoint. Replace IAM/IRSA service auth with OIDC or SPIFFE. Replace SQS/SNS with RabbitMQ, NATS, or Kafka. Move secrets behind the External Secrets Operator or Vault.
Phase 2, infrastructure as code (weeks 2 to 6, in parallel). Do the OpenTofu/Terraform provider swap, stand up network and VPC equivalents, and add ingress-nginx or Traefik, cert-manager, external-dns, CSI storage classes, and the cluster autoscaler.
Phase 3, data (weeks 4 to 10). Use Postgres logical replication (or pg_dump for smaller sets), sync object storage with rclone or aws s3 sync against the S3-compatible endpoint, set an egress budget, rehearse the cutover window, and write the rollback plan down.
Phase 4, cutover. Lower DNS TTLs days ahead, run read traffic on the new cloud first, then writes, and keep AWS warm for a defined rollback period.
Phase 5, the one nobody budgets. CI/CD, environment provisioning, preview environments, RBAC, secrets distribution, observability, and on-call runbooks all have to be rebuilt on the new cloud. This is covered in the next section, because it is where the timeline actually slips.
The lowest-risk way to prove the target platform is preview environments on the new cloud: validate deployments on pull requests before any production traffic moves. It turns "we think it works" into "we deployed it forty times last week."
How do you avoid rebuilding your internal platform when you change cloud?
Keep the developer interface constant and let the cloud underneath change: standardize on Kubernetes and put a cloud-agnostic platform layer on top, so CI/CD, environment provisioning, and RBAC do not get rewritten per provider. This is typically half the migration effort and the part that gets left out of the plan.
Here is exactly what a team loses when it leaves AWS: EKS plus IRSA, CodeBuild and CodePipeline, Parameter Store and Secrets Manager, CloudWatch dashboards and alarms, and years of internal glue scripts and Terraform modules written against AWS-specific resources. None of that ports. You have three honest options to replace it:
Build it yourself: OpenTofu plus Argo CD plus Crossplane plus Backstage. Maximum control, and you now own a platform-engineering product forever.
Buy a cloud-agnostic internal developer platform that gives developers self-service on whatever cluster you run.
Accept a European PaaS and its lock-in (Clever Cloud, Scaleway Serverless). Fast, pleasant, and portable only up to a point.
A fair word on the tools you will meet in the build-it-yourself column, because they are complements, not villains:
HashiCorp OpenTofu/Terraform and Vault are the portability backbone for infrastructure and secrets. They are the right tool for that job. They do not give developers a self-service deploy workflow, so they sit a layer below an internal developer platform and complement it.
Backstage is a genuinely good developer portal, but it is a catalogue and UI framework, not a deployment engine. You still build the underlying automation yourself. We have written before about where Backstage fits and where it does not.
Where Qovery fits, stated precisely: Qovery is the platform layer that survives the migration. It deploys and operates your apps inside your own cloud account on AWS, GCP, Azure, or Scaleway (native, first-class support), and on any existing Kubernetes cluster, including OVHcloud MKS, IONOS Managed Kubernetes, Exoscale SKS, self-managed k3s on Hetzner, or on-prem. Those non-native clusters work because they are conformant Kubernetes, not because of a first-party integration, and that is the whole point: the same internal developer platform rides on top wherever you land. The capabilities I will stand behind because we actually ship them: git-push deploys, preview environments per pull request, per-environment RBAC, environment auto-stop for non-production, managed cluster upgrades, and databases backed by managed cloud services.
Why BYOC matters specifically for sovereignty: the cloud account, the data, the encryption keys, and the bill stay in your name and your jurisdiction. Any commitments or discounts stay with you, and the provider contract is signed by you, not by a SaaS vendor on your behalf. That is exactly what a sovereignty review asks for.
Two limits, plainly: Qovery is not a European cloud provider and does not replace OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS, or Exoscale. It also does not make you compliant or sovereign by itself. It removes the platform-engineering cost of the choice, so switching clouds stops being a re-platforming project.
Approach
Who owns the cloud account and data
Works across AWS + EU providers + your own Kubernetes?
Yes (AWS/GCP/Azure/Scaleway native, any conformant cluster)
Yes, out of the box
Minutes to hours
Low (managed for you)
Low
What does leaving AWS for a European cloud actually cost?
European providers are consistently cheaper than AWS list prices on compute, storage, and especially egress, with several including egress at no charge, but the migration itself costs real engineering months plus a one-time data transfer. Build the business case on sovereignty plus total cost over 24 to 36 months, not on month-one savings.
Two structural cost differences do most of the work:
The control-plane and egress rows are verified list prices as of September 2026 with the sources linked above. The instance, object-storage, and managed-Postgres rows vary too much by region and instance family to quote a single honest number, so treat them as directional (European list prices sit consistently below the comparable AWS on-demand line) and confirm on each provider's pricing page for your exact shapes. I would rather send you to the page than invent a figure.
One-time migration costs to budget: initial data egress, running both clouds in parallel for 4 to 8 weeks, the engineering months themselves, and re-certification or audit work. Two facts most teams do not know cut the exit cost materially:
The EU Data Act (Regulation (EU) 2023/2854) became applicable on 12 September 2025, and from 12 January 2027 cloud providers may not charge switching costs at all, with only cost-based charges permitted in the transition.
Two more line items to plan around. Sunk AWS commitments (Savings Plans and Reserved Instances) are not transferable, so schedule the cutover around their expiry dates. And cost creeps back where you now operate more yourself: Kubernetes upgrades, the observability stack, backups, and on-call, unless you buy a platform layer that handles them. On smaller European providers, where elastic capacity is less generous than on AWS, FinOps hygiene matters more, not less: environment auto-stop and right-sized preview environments are where the savings actually show up. Repatriation data backs the direction of travel: Flexera's 2026 report found organizations have repatriated about 21% of workloads and data, saving an average of 32% per repatriated workload.
When should you not migrate off AWS?
Do not migrate if your architecture is deeply serverless, if your sovereignty requirement can be satisfied with EU regions plus customer-held keys, or if you have no regulatory or contractual driver. In most of those cases a partial or hybrid move beats a full exit.
Serverless-heavy systems. If Lambda, DynamoDB, Step Functions, and Kinesis are load-bearing, the rewrite cost frequently exceeds the compliance benefit. Consider AWS European Sovereign Cloud, or isolate only the regulated data set and move that.
Data-residency-only requirements. An EU region plus customer-managed keys, EU-based support, and contractual guarantees sometimes satisfies the DPO. Ask before you architect, because the answer changes the whole project.
Hybrid patterns that genuinely work. Keep regulated data and identity on an EU-owned cloud, run stateless compute wherever it is cheapest, put Kubernetes on both sides so workloads stay movable, and run one control plane across both. See our public-sector comparison of sovereign clouds and hyperscalers for how this plays out in regulated environments.
The minimum move everyone should make. Make yourself migratable even if you never leave: containers, the S3 API, managed Postgres, cloud-agnostic IaC, and a portable platform layer. Optionality has value on its own, and it is cheap insurance.
A multi-cloud reality check. Running two clouds well is harder than running one badly. Only do it with a single deployment control plane and a single RBAC model, or the operational tax eats the savings.
A short decision rule you can act on today: regulatory mandate plus containerized stack, migrate. No mandate plus serverless stack, stay and become portable. Mandate plus serverless stack, split the regulated workload out first.
Which European cloud providers offer a realistic migration path from AWS without a full application rebuild?
OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS Cloud, Exoscale, and Open Telekom Cloud all offer managed Kubernetes with a standard API, S3-compatible object storage, and managed Postgres/MySQL, which is the combination that lets a containerized AWS workload move without an application rewrite. Clever Cloud is the strongest European PaaS but has no customer-owned Kubernetes cluster, and Hetzner is the cheapest option but has no managed Kubernetes control plane. The move is realistic in weeks for container and VM workloads, and turns into a rewrite only where you depend on serverless-first AWS services.
Does hosting data in an AWS EU region protect me from the US CLOUD Act?
No. The CLOUD Act reaches data in a US provider's possession, custody, or control regardless of where it is physically stored, so an EU region operated by a US-headquartered company does not remove the exposure. What changes your legal position is the jurisdiction of the entity that signs the contract, who can technically access the data plane, and who holds the encryption keys. This is why DPOs and schemes like SecNumCloud treat an EU-owned provider differently from an EU region of a US hyperscaler.
What AWS services are hardest to replace on a European cloud?
Lambda, DynamoDB, Step Functions, Kinesis, Cognito, and IAM-based service authentication are the six with no drop-in European equivalent, so leaning on them means a rewrite rather than a migration. Everything else has a standards-based replacement: EKS to managed Kubernetes, S3 to S3-compatible storage, RDS to managed Postgres through logical replication. The test is simple: if the replacement is a standard API, it is config; if it changes application semantics, it is a rewrite.
Is AWS European Sovereign Cloud enough, or do I need an EU-owned provider?
It depends on how your DPO scores the residual risk of a US parent company. AWS European Sovereign Cloud runs through a German legal entity with EU-resident personnel and EU-only operations, which satisfies many data-residency and operational-access requirements. Some legal teams accept that; others require an EU-owned provider with no US parent in the ownership chain, which is where OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS, and Exoscale come in. Ask your counsel to score both against your specific obligations before you architect.
How long does it take to migrate a containerized application from AWS to OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS, or Exoscale?
A containerized monolith or microservices on EKS with RDS typically takes 4 to 12 weeks, dominated by data replication and cutover rather than code changes. A mix of containers plus a few managed services runs closer to a quarter. A heavily serverless, event-driven system is two to four quarters or a partial migration, because you are rewriting rather than moving. Standardizing on Kubernetes, the S3 API, and OpenTofu before you start is the single biggest lever on that timeline.
Can Qovery deploy to European cloud providers and to my own Kubernetes cluster?
Yes. Qovery supports AWS, GCP, Azure, and Scaleway natively, and it deploys to any existing conformant Kubernetes cluster, including OVHcloud MKS, IONOS Managed Kubernetes, Exoscale SKS, self-managed k3s on Hetzner, or on-prem. With bring-your-own-cloud, the cloud account, data, keys, and bill stay in your name, and your developers keep git-push deploys, preview environments per pull request, per-environment RBAC, and environment auto-stop before and after the move. Qovery is the platform layer on top of whichever provider you choose, not a cloud provider itself.
The teams who move off AWS cleanly are the ones who made themselves portable first and treated the developer platform as part of the migration, not an afterthought. If you want to change cloud without changing how your team ships, try Qovery free.
Romaric founded Qovery to make Kubernetes accessible to every engineering team. He writes about platform strategy, developer experience, and the future of cloud infrastructure.
Next step
Change cloud without changing how your team ships.
Qovery runs inside your own cloud account - AWS, GCP, Azure, Scaleway - or on your existing Kubernetes cluster at OVHcloud, IONOS, Exoscale, Hetzner, or on-prem. Same git-push deploys, preview environments, and RBAC before and after your migration.