S2 E5. Beyond Hyperscalers: How to Run Modern Data Platforms on European Clouds - The Data Playbook Podcast with Kris Peeters & Niels Claeys
The Data Playbook Podcast
<p>EU clouds without the hype. Niels Claeys (Partner & Lead Data Engineer at Dataminded, and our technical hiring lead) breaks down <strong>data sovereignty vs. Cloud Act</strong>, <strong>GDPR realities</strong>, and a <strong>portable, Kubernetes-first stack</strong> with <strong>Iceberg, Trino, and Airflow</strong>. We compare <strong>Scaleway, OVH, Exoscale, UpCloud</strong>, look at <strong>cost drivers</strong>, <strong>encryption/KMS</strong>, <strong>egress policies</strong>, and how to avoid <strong>vendor lock-in</strong> plus when <strong>best-of-breed</strong> beats <strong>all-in-one</strong> and why “<strong>keep it simple</strong>” still wins.</p>
<p><strong>What you’ll learn:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>When EU clouds make more sense than hyperscalers (and when they don’t)</li>
<li>Designing a portable platform: <strong>Terraform/Tofu</strong> for infra, <strong>Argo CD</strong> for apps</li>
<li>Table formats 101: why <strong>Apache Iceberg</strong> over plain Parquet/CSV</li>
<li>Query layer choices: <strong>Trino</strong> for open SQL across object storage & DBs</li>
<li>Orchestration in practice: <strong>Airflow</strong> patterns, dependencies, SLAs</li>
<li>Security & governance: <strong>OPA</strong> for fine-grained policies, IAM, catalogs</li>
<li>Cost & ops: egress, managed services gaps, version lag, troubleshooting</li>
<li>Team skills: what to hire for, and the “hard questions” Niels asks in interviews</li>
</ul>
<p>🌐 More at <a href="https://www.dataminded.com/" rel="nofollow">www.dataminded.com</a> — and subscribe!</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><strong>Chapters</strong></p>
<p>00:00 Intro & why EU clouds now</p>
<p>04:40 Compliance & legal: GDPR, Cloud Act, sovereignty</p>
<p>11:55 Platform blueprint: Kubernetes + Iceberg + Trino + Airflow</p>
<p>20:30 Catalogs, OPA, IAM & access control</p>
<p>27:10 EU providers deep dive: Scaleway, OVH, Exoscale, UpCloud</p>
<p>36:20 Cost, encryption/KMS, egress & performance</p>
<p>43:10 Best-of-breed vs all-in-one (and glue work)</p>
<p>51:00 Getting started: IaC, Argo CD, day-2 ops</p>
<p>56:40 Hiring: interview signals & practical takeaways</p>
<p><strong>Keywords</strong></p>
<p>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</p>