As a Scottish tech co-op, the cloud infrastructure we run on is as much an ethical decision as a financial one. In this talk we'll share our migration away from US Big Tech to Hetzner: how we cut our monthly cloud bill by 76% while tripling our capacity, the stack we built around Talos Linux and Kubernetes to make self-managed infrastructure practical for a small team, and the challenges that caught us off guard along the way.
We'll open up the conversation to the broader question: what does it actually look like to run on European cloud? What providers are people using, what are the real trade-offs versus managed services from the hyperscalers, and how much does it matter where your infrastructure lives? We're also curious what the community considers the minimal viable stack.
Endre and Chris form Digital Society, a worker-owned tech co-operative in Scotland.