European Alternatives is a project that collects and analyzes European alternatives to digital services and products, such as cloud services and SaaS products. We regularly receive advice and suggestions from European Alternatives users, so feel free to reach out!

• Web analytics services
• Cloud computing platforms
• Content delivery network (CDN) services
• Email providers
• Virtual private server (VPS) hosters
• Search engines
• Transactional email service
• Domain name registrars
• Time tracking apps
• Navigation apps
• Uptime monitoring services
• File hosting services
• Machine translation services
• Object storage providers
• Microblogging services
• VPN services
• Managed DNS providers
• Professional networking platforms
• Function as a service (FaaS) providers
• Platform as a service (PaaS) providers
• Error tracking services
• Electronic signature software
• Public DNS resolvers
• Payment service providers
• Captcha services
• Spelling and grammar checkers
• Password managers
• Instant messaging apps
• Version control services
• Identity and access management (IAM) services
• Live chat software
• Web browsers
• Video conferencing software
• Document collaboration services
• Calendar services
• Email marketing services
• Font services
• WordPress hosting providers
• Team communication services
• Managed Kubernetes services
• Video hosting services
• Video platforms
• Maps API services
• Tag management systems
• DDoS protection services
• Session recording tools
• ACME SSL certificate providers
• Survey tools
• Marketing automation software
• Project Management Software
• SMS APIs

CLI to analyze IaC: Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, Helm, ARM Templates and Serverless framework

tl;dr :

• Start using [your software] in production in a non-critical capacity (by sending a small percentage of traffic to it, on a less critical service, etc)
• try to have each incident only once
• Understand what is ok to break and isn’t

For example, with Kubernetes:

• ok to break:
  • any stateless control plane component can crash or be cycled out or go down for 5 minutes at any time
  • kubernetes networking can break as much as it wants because we decided not to use it to start
• not ok to break
  • for us, if etcd goes down for 10 minutes, that’s ok
  • containers not starting or crashing on startup
  • containers not having access to the resources they need
  • pods being terminated unexpectedly by Kubernetes

With Envoy, the breakdown is pretty different:

we operate Kubernetes as follows to try and minimise it:

• We run multiple production clusters and teams are able to choose which clusters to run their application in. We don’t use Federation yet (we’re waiting on AWS support) but we use Envoy instead to load-balance across the different cluster Ingress load-balancers. We can automate much of this with our Continuous Delivery pipeline (we use Drone) and other AWS services.
• All clusters are configured with the same Namespaces. These map approximately 1:1 with teams.
• We use RBAC to control access to Namespaces. All access is authenticated and authorised against our corporate identity in Active Directory.
• Clusters are auto-scaled and we do as much as we can to optimise node start-up time.
• Applications auto-scale using application-level metrics exported from Prometheus.