#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.
https://techleaguepodcast.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP
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