S2:E5

Beyond Hyperscalers: How to Run Modern Data Platforms on European Clouds

Data Platform
56 min

Host

Kris PeetersKris Peeters

Guest

Niels ClaeysNiels Claeys

EU clouds without the hype. Niels Claeys (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.

🌐 More at ⁠www.dataminded.com⁠ — and subscribe!

What you'll see

  • ▸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

Tags

European CloudsData SovereigntyKubernetesTerraformTrinoAirflowCloud IndependenceDatamindedThe Data Playbook

Listen on

Technologies

AirflowKubernetesTerraformTrinoSQL

Additional material