AWS European Sovereign Cloud (EUSC) – a field report

Over the past weeks, I’ve been working on bringing our products to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud wich launched in January 2026. With yesterday’s release we were the 2nd company to make it into the AWS Marketplace in the European Sovereign Cloud. In the folllwing I will share my learnings and thoughts.

What’s the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (EUSC)?

The the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (aws-eusc) is an indepentent partion similar to the AWS GovCloud (aws-us-gov) and AWS China (aws-cn). In contrast to the GovCloud, the EUSC is open for all customers. And unlike AWS China, EUSC is not operated by a third party but by AWS itself.

Today, the EUSC consists of a single region in Brandenburg called eusc-de-east-1. The EUSC is designed to be indepentent from the US from both a technical and organisational perspective.

From a technical point of view, AWS did a great job. For example, AWS built a separate identity and access management (IAM), domain name system (DNS), trust service provider, and much more. All services are available under separate domains like amazonaws.eu and amazonaws-eusc.eu. Even the documentation for the EUSC stands for its own.

Besides that, AWS operates the EUSC exclusively by EU residents: operations, technical support, customer service.¹ Although AWS has also established companies under German law, these are subsidiaries of the US company. Critics therefore question its legal independence.

Why widdix goes AWS European Sovereign Cloud?

We decided to bring our products to the EUSC for three reasons:

1. The AWS EUSC opens up a new market. We want to leverage our advantages as first movers. Many of our competitors are not yet represented in the EUSC.
2. We like to try new things. It is a challenge to deal with the shortcomings of new services. And you can write wonderful rants.
3. In politically unstable times, we support the goal of establishing a sovereign European cloud infrastructure.

What did we learn about the AWS European Sovereign Cloud?

We opened our first EUSC account in February. Here is what we learned from practice.

Missing services and features

Not all AWS services are yet available in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (EUSC). For examples, the following services are not yet available: CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, Elastic Beanstalk, IAM Identity Center, CloudFront, Inspector, MQ, Managed Grafana, Managed Prometheus, and Security Hub. Check out the AWS Capabilities by Region overview for details.

It is annoying but understandable that not all services are available at the launch of the eusc-de-east-1 region. What totally surprised us is that even for services that are actually available, not all features are provided.

• EC2 Instance Connect to temporary grant SSH access is not available.
• IAM Identity Center is not missing which makes access management multiple accounts much harder.
• AWS Marketplace does neiter support AMI+CloudFormation products nor free trials for AMI products. Also metered billing is missing.

Two instead of three availability zones

It is worth noting that the eusc-de-east-1 region consists of only two availability zones. We actually thought that those days were behind us and that all regions would provide at least three AZs. But here, it seems that a mistake from the past is repeating itself. Anyway, it’s nothing that can’t be solved with another condition in Infrastructure as Code.

So-so tooling support

Working with the new AWS partition aws-eusc requires all tools to send requests to different API endpoints due to a separate domain name. Therefore, you need to update tools, like the AWS CLI or Terraform for example, to the latest version. In case you are using AWS SDKs, you need to upgrade to the latest version as well. Unfortunately, not all tools have shipped a new version that supports the EUSC already. Sometimes, there is a possiblity to override the API endpoint with a configuration option.

Increase service quoatas requires support tickets

To ensure the high quality of our solutions, we rely on detailed integration tests. A high degree of parallelization of the tests requires increasing AWS service quotas. We have learned that many quotas, which can normally be increased automatically at AWS, require a support ticket at EUSC. This has significantly increased the amount of work for us.

AWS Support

Speaking of support tickets, be prepared for the fact that the plans for AWS support in the EUSC are different.

To subscribe to the Business support plan in the EUSC, you need to open a support ticket. The Enterprise plan is only available through your account manager.

From my experience I can tell, that it takes the support team in EUSC a little longer to respond. The team seems to be quite small, so far I talked to the same two people for all my support issues.

In summary, brining our first product to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud was a journey with obstacles. I hope our experiences help you to be a better prepared for the EUSC.

What’s ahead for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud?

It remains to be seen how customers will respond to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Given the current political situation, it is questionable whether the target group of government organizations and regulated industries will embrace the AWS Cloud. We are watching the market closely.

Another question is how AWS will deal with the organizational divide between AWS in the US and AWS in Europe. How will the teams work together? What happens when troubleshooting becomes complicated? And how will further development succeed?

What is your experience with the AWS European Cloud? Let me know!