Here are the articles I wrote for InfoQ in March 2025, covering everything from Fauna shutting down to the available European cloud providers.

European Cloud Providers: What Are the Options Today?

Current geopolitical tensions have raised attention to existing cloud providers in Europe, with many European companies increasingly concerned about reliance on US-controlled services. According to various articles by specialists and practitioners, local cloud providers still offer few viable alternatives for organizations focused on European digital sovereignty.

Fauna Shutting Down: Is the Future Open Source?

The team behind the distributed serverless database Fauna has recently announced plans to shut down the service by the end of May. While the managed database will be terminated soon and all customers will have to migrate to other platforms, Fauna is committing to releasing an open source version of the core database technology alongside the existing drivers and CLI tooling.

Google Cloud Introduces HDD Tier for Spanner Database, Cutting Cold Storage Costs by 80%

Google has recently introduced tiered storage for Spanner, its distributed SQL database on Google Cloud. This tiered storage is based on a new HDD storage option that is 80% cheaper than the existing SSD option, allowing for cost optimization of older data while minimizing the overhead associated with traditional data migration.

Google Report Reveals How Threat Actors Are Currently Using Generative AI

Google’s Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) recently released a report on the adversarial misuse of generative AI. The team investigated prompts used by advanced persistent threat (APT) and coordinated information operations (IO) actors, finding that they have so far achieved productivity gains but have not yet developed novel capabilities.

Vercel Fluid: a New Compute Model and an Alternative to Serverless?

Vercel has recently introduced Vercel Fluid, an elastic compute model that allows a single worker to handle multiple requests, similar to a traditional server, while preserving the elasticity of serverless. By scaling functions before instances, Fluid maximizes available compute time, optimizing compute footprint and resource efficiency for long-running tasks and AI inference.

Resilience Best Practices: How Amazon Builds Well-Behaved Clients and Well-Protected Services

Using the analogy of addressing the lunch rush in restaurants, Michael Haken, senior principal solutions architect at AWS, describes how Amazon builds both well-behaved clients and well-protected services through operational and architectural strategies.

AWS CDK Introduces Garbage Collection to Remove Outdated Assets

Amazon recently introduced the preview of garbage collection in the AWS CDK. The new feature automatically deletes old assets in bootstrapped S3 buckets and ECR repositories, reducing maintenance and deployment costs.

How a Manual Remediation for a Phishing URL Took down Cloudflare R2

Due to human error in handling a phishing report and insufficient validation safeguards in admin tools, Cloudflare experienced an incident affecting its R2 Gateway service on February 5th. As part of a routine remediation for a phishing URL, the R2 service was inadvertently taken down, leading to the outage or disruption of numerous other Cloudflare services for over an hour.