European alternatives to Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is a full scale cloud platform offering virtual machines, managed databases, object storage, networking, container services and a long catalogue of managed products. Organisations already invested in Microsoft software often choose it because identity, licensing and tooling line up with what they run on premises. Startups and large enterprises alike build production workloads on it.

Cloud infrastructure is the deepest dependency an organisation takes on: it holds the data, runs the code and controls the exit path. US legislation such as the CLOUD Act applies to US providers wherever the servers physically stand, which is why resilience and procurement discussions in Europe keep returning to this layer. A European alternative to Microsoft Azure covers the same primitives. OVHcloud and Scaleway offer broad platforms, while UpCloud and Exoscale focus on compute and storage.