S2 E5 | Beyond Hyperscalers: How to Run Modern Data Platforms on European Clouds
•
Niels Claeys & Kris Peeters
How to build secure, open, GDPR-aligned data platforms on EU clouds - tech choices, trade-offs, and hiring insights from the front lines.
EU clouds without the hype. Niels (Partner & Lead Data Engineer at Dataminded, and our technical hiring lead) breaks down data sovereignty vs. Cloud Act, GDPR realities, and a portable, Kubernetes-first stack with Iceberg, Trino, and Airflow. We compare Scaleway, OVH, Exoscale, UpCloud, look at cost drivers, encryption/KMS, egress policies, and how to avoid vendor lock-in plus when best-of-breed beats all-in-one and why “keep it simple” still wins.
What you’ll learn
When EU clouds make more sense than hyperscalers (and when they don’t)
Designing a portable platform: Terraform/Tofu for infra, Argo CD for apps
Table formats 101: why Apache Iceberg over plain Parquet/CSV
Query layer choices: Trino for open SQL across object storage & DBs
Orchestration in practice: Airflow patterns, dependencies, SLAs
Security & governance: OPA for fine-grained policies, IAM, catalogs
Cost & ops: egress, managed services gaps, version lag, troubleshooting
Team skills: what to hire for, and the “hard questions” Niels asks in interviews
Topics: EU cloud, European cloud providers, data sovereignty, GDPR, Cloud Act, Kubernetes data platform, Apache Iceberg, Trino, Airflow, vendor lock-in, OPA, Argo CD, Terraform, Exoscale, Scaleway, OVH, UpCloud
Latest
Data Producer Enablement and Developer Experience for Data Teams
Andrew Jones on data contracts, producer tooling and why access alone never solved self-service.
Data Contracts and Data Products: What AI Agents Need to Access Enterprise Data
AI agents need their own access rules. Simon Harrer, Entropy Data, on data contracts, data products and purpose-based access control.
Data Mesh After the Hype: Why Data Products Matter More Than Ever
Why Data Products outlasted Data Mesh, where Data Contracts fit, and how AI is changing modern data architecture.
