Scaling Resilient Cloud: Key Takeaways from Leaseweb’s Roundtable
Earlier this summer, a cloud-focused roundtable in Amsterdam brought together experts, project managers, and startups to discuss one of the most pressing topics in cloud infrastructure today: scaling resilient cloud environments while controlling costs. The discussion highlighted practical challenges and strategies for organizations operating in Europe.
Scaling: More Than Just Adding Servers
Participants agreed that scaling is often perceived as straightforward, press a button, and resources are added. But true resilience requires attention to the entire stack. It’s not just about hardware; it’s about applications, regulatory compliance, and understanding business objectives.
For startups using bare metal servers, scaling isn’t instant, it requires careful capacity planning and technical expertise. While public cloud offers flexibility, bare metal provides control, which is critical for performance-sensitive or highly regulated applications.
Cost Optimization: Avoiding the Public Cloud Trap
A key insight was that while public cloud enables rapid scaling, costs can quickly escalate. Organizations often find that relying solely on public cloud eats into margins over time. Investing in physical infrastructure, colocation, or a hybrid approach can save money in the long run, especially for predictable workloads.
At the same time, fully managing your own infrastructure carries operational risk and requires expertise. Outsourcing to a trusted provider can shift that risk but comes at a premium. The challenge is finding the right balance between cost, control, and operational overhead.
Resilience: Building for High Availability
Resilience is more than just redundancy. It’s about designing systems to handle outages and peak loads while meeting regulatory requirements. Ensuring high availability requires careful planning around data storage, geographic distribution, and application design.
Security considerations also play a major role. Public-facing applications require continuous monitoring, code review, and adherence to best practices to prevent vulnerabilities and mitigate risks from cyberattacks.
Sovereignty: The European Perspective
As the conversation evolved, sovereignty emerged as a natural extension of resilience and control. European organizations are increasingly aware of the risks of relying on non-European cloud providers, particularly in terms of data privacy, regulatory compliance, and economic dependency.
Participants highlighted that moving to truly European-based cloud solutions is challenging but achievable. The main considerations include:
- Data location and compliance: Ensuring sensitive data stays within European borders and meets regional regulations.
- Vendor diversity: There is currently no single European provider that can replace all services from large hyperscalers, which means companies often rely on a mix of solutions. We need to make a conscious effort to build up our European providers through initiatives such as the European Cloud Campus.
- Strategic migration: Switching from global services to European alternatives requires careful planning, integration, and acceptance of potential cost increases.
The consensus was that while full sovereignty may be a long-term goal, organizations can take incremental steps today by combining European cloud platforms, hybrid solutions, and risk-focused strategies to reduce dependency on foreign infrastructure.
Key Takeaways
The roundtable highlighted several lessons for organizations seeking to scale cloud infrastructure in Europe:
- Scaling is easy, but resilience requires strategy: Consider the application, end-to-end stack, and regulatory environment.
- Cost optimization is essential: Evaluate whether public cloud, colocation, bare metal, or hybrid solutions best fit your performance and budget goals.
- Hybrid approaches often work best: Combining different types of infrastructure provides flexibility without sacrificing control.
- Expertise and preparation are critical: Planning, monitoring, and operational knowledge are just as important as the underlying infrastructure.
- Sovereignty matters: European data privacy, regulatory compliance, and reducing dependency on non-European providers are increasingly important considerations.
The discussion reinforced that building scalable, resilient cloud infrastructure is both a technical and strategic exercise. By focusing on the right mix of infrastructure, cost optimization, application-centric design, and regional control, organizations can grow efficiently without compromising performance or sovereignty.