Copenhagen Municipality probably has the country’s largest municipal data science department with 15 employees, who handle all tasks in a data science project from start to finish. When they were established in 2017, they started looking for a cloud solution. The rest of the municipality used Microsoft Azure, so this was the first choice. But in 2020 with the Schrems-II verdict, it was not for certain that Azure lived up to European data regulation. Then they changed direction.
“We went from running all our stuff on the Azure environment, which is a kind of walled garden. It’s a whole ecosystem, it provides many easy advantages when building solutions, and you get served many functions,” says subject coordinator Kåre Obel Wedel according to the tech media Version2.
“Now we’re out in the wild west, where anything is possible, but you’re not held by the hand like you are with these big platform suppliers. So we have really embraced free open source software solutions, and we have started to create solutions that are cloud independent. In concrete terms, this means that all our solutions run as Docker containers in a Kubernetes cluster at our cloud provider, Scaleway.”
According to Version2, they do not miss Azure at all.
At DataEthics, we know that our guide to European Cloud Solutions has helped Copenhagen Municipality and others to find alternatives to big tech.