I've done quite a bit of government contracting for governments in Europe, including various government levels in Belgium and the EU itself. Every single time, I encountered a lot of friction regarding hosting. The applications were always hosted by a partner [1] that won a large public tender, usually by virtue of supposedly being the cheapest. Those hosting partners were invariably awful and incompetent. Simple tasks would take weeks. Complex tasks wouldn't happen at all. There was enough red tape to go to the moon and back.
Every project I worked on, developers (consultants like me) advocated for finding a way of bypassing the hosting partner, and either doing their thing on top of platforms like Hetzner, or switching to AWS/Azure. Not because they particularly love AWS, but because the default hosting solution sucks so much arse.
I can totally see EU cloud infrastructure working for the public sector, but ONLY if they come with the same level of self-service management as the big cloud providers. Without that, it's a non-starter.
[1] One of those is a large French company on the verge of banruptcy.
Every project I worked on, developers (consultants like me) advocated for finding a way of bypassing the hosting partner, and either doing their thing on top of platforms like Hetzner, or switching to AWS/Azure. Not because they particularly love AWS, but because the default hosting solution sucks so much arse.
I can totally see EU cloud infrastructure working for the public sector, but ONLY if they come with the same level of self-service management as the big cloud providers. Without that, it's a non-starter.
[1] One of those is a large French company on the verge of banruptcy.