S2 E5. Beyond Hyperscalers: How to Run Modern Data Platforms on European Clouds - The Data Playbook Podcast with Kris Peeters & Niels 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.

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

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

Chapters

00:00 Intro & why EU clouds now

04:40 Compliance & legal: GDPR, Cloud Act, sovereignty

11:55 Platform blueprint: Kubernetes + Iceberg + Trino + Airflow

20:30 Catalogs, OPA, IAM & access control

27:10 EU providers deep dive: Scaleway, OVH, Exoscale, UpCloud

36:20 Cost, encryption/KMS, egress & performance

43:10 Best-of-breed vs all-in-one (and glue work)

51:00 Getting started: IaC, Argo CD, day-2 ops

56:40 Hiring: interview signals & practical takeaways

Keywords

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