Coinerella’s European cloud overhaul demonstrates the compelling reasons behind choosing alternative cloud providers: lower costs and increased demands, yet ultimately proving their value.
Often, concepts like data sovereignty, localized services, and “alternative cloud” approaches are oversimplified within major cloud provider interfaces, appearing as mere region selections or compliance checkboxes. However, IT firm Coinerella recently detailed its journey to transition from a standard US-centric startup infrastructure to a “Made in the EU” stack. Their experience highlights sovereignty not as a simple feature, but as a foundational architectural principle and operational framework capable of delivering cost savings. This shift, however, brings its own set of challenges, including friction, necessary compromises, and a greater degree of responsibility compared to relying on established, default ecosystems.
Coinerella intentionally designed its platform to avoid reliance on AWS and other US-based hyperscalers. This decision was motivated by critical factors such as data residency requirements, adherence to GDPR, mitigating vendor concentration risk, and showcasing the operational effectiveness of European infrastructure. While many organizations discuss sovereignty, their resolve often falters at the first major production issue, compliance audit, or integration hurdle. Coinerella, however, is steadfast in its commitment and actively managing the implications of this strategic choice.
Constructing an ‘EU-Native’ Infrastructure
Coinerella achieved sovereignty not by pioneering novel approaches, but by rebuilding a conventional modern platform using European vendors and judiciously self-hosting certain services. Their core compute and foundational infrastructure, encompassing virtual machines, load balancing, and S3-compatible object storage, were migrated to Hetzner. This move reveals a fascinating insight: contrary to the common hyperscaler narrative that migrating from AWS primarily entails a loss of features, Coinerella discovered a different reality, at least for essential services. They experienced robust performance and capabilities with their new setup, along with an attractive cost structure, contrasting sharply with the typical AWS experience for many teams.
Where Hetzner’s managed service offerings fell short of their requirements, Coinerella supplemented its stack with Scaleway, covering needs such as transactional email, a container registry, extra object storage, observability solutions, and domain registration. While integrating multiple providers often escalates complexity in migrations, Coinerella deliberately adopted this strategy, prioritizing the optimal regional option for each service over a monolithic, single-vendor approach.
For edge services, Bunny.net was chosen for its content delivery network (CDN) and associated functionalities, including storage, DNS management, image optimization, web application firewall (WAF), and DDoS defense. This selection underscores the critical role edge services play, not merely as supplementary components, but as fundamental pillars of a platform’s overall reliability and security. According to Coinerella’s blog, the transition from a more familiar Cloudflare environment to Bunny.net was smooth and intuitive, an ideal outcome when de-risking a migration.
Furthermore, Coinerella tackled AI inference with sovereignty in mind, leveraging European GPU resources through Nebius instead of defaulting to US-based regions for their inference workloads. For identity management, they implemented Hanko, a European authentication solution that supports contemporary methods like passkeys and integrates seamlessly with popular social login options.
Crucially, Coinerella opted to self-host a significant suite of internal services on Kubernetes, managed by Rancher. This encompassed Gitea for version control, Plausible for analytics, Twenty for CRM, Infisical for secrets management, and Bugsink for error tracking. Anyone who has recommended self-hosting “just a few things” to an organization understands the true implication: it signifies entering into a distinct operational agreement where cost efficiencies and enhanced control are balanced by the responsibilities of full lifecycle ownership.
Unexpected Challenges and Additional Obstacles
The true insight from Coinerella’s account comes from its candid discussion of the hurdles encountered with less “glamorous” but critical services that profoundly impact developer efficiency. Transactional email proved to be a significant pain point. Within the US ecosystem, an abundance of mature, easy-to-integrate transactional email solutions exist, backed by extensive community support for deliverability and troubleshooting. While Coinerella successfully implemented a European alternative, the core lesson is striking: the vast array of integrations, pre-built templates, and community solutions is not uniformly available across all regions. The service itself might be functional, but organizations may frequently find themselves acting as their own primary integration and support team.
Version control presented another significant obstacle. Shifting away from GitHub extends beyond merely changing a Git remote; it means departing from a comprehensive ecosystem that includes default CI/CD pipelines, pre-built actions, marketplace integrations, and the ingrained operational habits of developers accustomed to GitHub’s methodologies. While Gitea offers a robust foundation, it doesn’t inherently replicate the complete, integrated development pipeline often provided “out-of-the-box” by the leading platform.
Cost disparities also emerged. The author observed that certain top-level domains were notably, and occasionally dramatically, more expensive via European registrars, without a clear justification. While this isn’t a fundamental architectural impediment, it’s precisely the kind of practical detail that underscores a key message: such migrations are far from pristine, controlled experiments. You should anticipate encountering unforeseen market structural variations, and you will need to assess their significance to your overall strategy.
Inevitable External Dependencies
For those seeking a narrative of absolute purity where “every US dependency was eliminated,” this isn’t that story. Coinerella openly recognized that certain dependencies are inherently structural. For instance, user acquisition often necessitates engagement with Google’s extensive advertising ecosystem, and mobile app distribution typically mandates adherence to Apple’s developer program. Social login functionalities frequently leverage Google and Apple infrastructure, and discontinuing these could negatively impact conversion rates. Even in the realm of AI, pressure exists: accessing cutting-edge frontier models might compel the use of US-hosted APIs.
The more judicious stance implicitly advocated by this article involves strategically minimizing controllable dependencies, isolating unavoidable ones, and maintaining transparency about the inherent trade-offs. Sovereignty should not be viewed as an all-or-nothing proposition; rather, it exists as a continuum of strategic decisions concerning the location of your critical data and operational reliance.
Transitioning to an Alternative Cloud Model
Coinerella’s journey reflects a broader trend among enterprises exploring alternative cloud solutions, such as sovereign clouds, private clouds, and other non-standard platforms. The primary insight gleaned is that the economic benefits of such a shift often stem directly from assuming greater operational responsibility. While genuine infrastructure cost reductions are achievable, they are invariably coupled with heightened demands for integration efforts, expanded platform engineering, and a more advanced level of operational maturity.
This scenario also highlights the critical “want versus need” discussion. Hyperscalers have accustomed teams to a menu-driven approach for selecting managed services, often driven by convenience, speed, and ease of political adoption. Alternative cloud strategies, however, necessitate rigorous prioritization. You might desire the latest managed features, the most extensive marketplace, and the widest ecosystem, but these may not be essential for achieving your specific business objectives. Opting for sovereignty or a private cloud foundation frequently leads to the adoption of simpler technologies that effectively meet requirements, even if they lack the “glamour” or extensive features of their hyperscaler counterparts. This represents not a step backward, but a deliberate exercise in architectural discipline.
Crucially, the success of such initiatives hinges on adopting new operational practices. FinOps evolves into a dedicated engineering discipline, encompassing diverse providers, self-hosted environments, and capacity planning choices that can no longer be offloaded to a hyperscaler. Observability transitions into a paramount design prerequisite, given that you are constructing a platform that spans multiple boundaries and includes components for which you bear end-to-end ownership. This necessitates uniform metrics, logs, traces, clear service-level objectives, and incident response protocols that function reliably, even when tools and APIs vary between providers. By undertaking a greater share of the workload, it becomes imperative to be more meticulous regarding patching, security protocols, data backups, recovery testing, and the creation of operational runbooks.
The central message isn’t that this undertaking is excessively difficult, but rather that its challenges are foreseeable. Coinerella’s blog convincingly argues that the endeavor is worthwhile, despite its inherent complexities—a perspective essential for enterprise leadership. Expecting sovereignty to be a simple product feature will lead to disillusionment. However, by embracing it as a strategic stance demanding genuine engineering investment, organizations can achieve the desired control, favorable cost structure, and locality advantages without being caught off guard by the effort involved.
