The Company
iPaper helps some of Europe and Latin America’s largest retailers bring their print catalogues to life online. The company’s core product takes printed leaflets like the ones from a local restaurant or real estate agent that come through your letterbox, and converts them into rich, interactive online publications. A second product goes further still, building digital leaflet experiences from scratch using a retailer’s existing product feeds and digital assets.
With more than 1,000 global customers, and around 30 people running the whole operation, iPaper punches considerably above its weight. The load is fairly constant, serving 100 million unique visits per month, shifting 1.4 petabytes of CDN traffic and around 600 terabytes from their application servers, each month. While not hyperscale, for a small company iPaper offers an extensive infrastructure operation, so the choices it makes about platforms are significant.
When American Infrastructure Becomes a European Liability
For years, iPaper ran on AWS, but as the company grew and its enterprise customer base deepened, cracks started to appear, not in its technology, but in terms of data sovereignty.
European enterprises, particularly in retail, need to know where their data is stored and who can access it. With AWS, that answer is surprisingly complicated. The US Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act gives American authorities broad powers to compel US companies to hand over data, regardless of where it is physically saved — a fact that sits uncomfortably alongside GDPR obligations.
“We have contracts with customers that we couldn’t sign due to us using AWS,” says iPaper’s VP of Engineering, Rasmus Seeberg.
The political landscape made this more urgent. The dismissal of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board under the Trump administration left the EU-US data transfer framework without the oversight mechanism it depends on. “That technically means that GDPR is not enforceable in the US at this point,” Seeberg notes. “How can GDPR be held up if oversight organization in the US is not functional?”
AWS’s answer, its EU Sovereign Cloud, didn’t satisfy iPaper either. “How does one migrate to the EU Sovereign Cloud? You set up everything again from scratch in a new AWS environment, because nothing is shared and there’s no way to copy things over. If we’re going to pay the cost of migrating, we might as well transfer to something that’s not owned by a US entity. AWS’s EU sovereign cloud is still owned by the US company, so it’s technically within the purview of the US CLOUD Act.”
Choosing Cycle
Cycle is also a US company, but their European control plane is fully segmented, running only on European-owned infrastructure providers, with no data or network overlap with their North American systems. However, the migration decision was not made quickly. iPaper evaluated a range of options: Nutanix, various Proxmox VE configurations (both self-managed and partner-managed), and other private cloud alternatives. None of them quite fit.
Kubernetes was also briefly on the table, but didn’t stay there long.
“I think the way Cycle handles containers is superior to Kubernetes. Kubernetes is cool, but I don’t want our infrastructure to be cool,” Seeberg says. “I want it to be simple, fast and efficient.”
Cycle’s approach — opinionated, well-considered, with clear paths for most use cases — felt like the right choice. Seeberg draws a comparison that will resonate with anyone who has spent time deep in the AWS console: “AWS is like going into your grandparents’ basement. There are 5,000 hand tools and you can build whatever you want, but there are no instructions and no one to help guide you. Microsoft is more guided, with one way to do things. If that works for you that’s great, but if it doesn’t you are out of luck.”
Seeberg described Cycle’s approach as closer to Microsoft’s, but with more flexibility. “They’ve thought long and hard about how to support your business needs, with enough flexibility via ‘escape hatches’ to accommodate unusual requirements,” he says. “We’ve used the hatches quite a lot because there are some specifics that we want to keep, and Cycle has done an amazing job in supporting that.”
The Architecture
iPaper runs two distinct products on Cycle, each with a different architectural story.
The older product is a .NET Framework application built around a single large SQL Server database — a few terabytes, serving the full 20 million monthly users with heavy caching to compensate for a lack of sharding. It’s not glamorous, but it works. Auxiliary services have been progressively rewritten to run as Docker containers, which lets iPaper right-size those workloads independently across machines with different resource profiles.
The newer product is built from scratch on open standards: Linux-based, the latest .NET version with C# on the back-end, PostgreSQL for the database, and TypeScript on the front end. It runs as 16 separate containers that together constitute a complete environment. Crucially, every development branch automatically spins up its own fully isolated environment, database included. Each service is a logical grouping that sits within what Domain-Driven Design calls a bounded context. Services communicate primarily over REST, with message queues handling anything that needs guaranteed delivery across boundaries (file distribution to CDN, backup CDN, and offsite storage, for instance).
All this runs on around 14 bare-metal servers rented from OVH, with Ceph-backed network storage for databases and VM storage. That storage choice means that if a server fails, a new one can be attached to the existing Ceph volumes and running again in roughly a minute, versus the 20-plus minutes a full database restore would take.
The Results
The migration is not complete, with the older .NET Framework product still running on AWS and actively being moved across. However, from moving to Cycle, iPaper realized:
- Cost savings of 25–30% on server infrastructure, including Cycle’s licensing fees.
- A further $156,000 in annual savings, driven largely by a CDN switch. Moving from AWS CloudFront and S3 to Bunny CDN, a European provider, is saving iPaper around $13,000 a month on traffic alone. Storage costs are slightly higher with Bunny, but the net saving is substantial.
- Predictable, understandable pricing. Unlike the variable, multi-dimensional billing that comes with hyperscale cloud, bare metal plus Cycle produces a monthly cost that doesn’t surprise anyone. The result is that iPaper now knows exactly what it will spend each month — a significant change from AWS, where a setup error can quietly incur enormous bills before anyone notices. “With AWS, you’re often not aware you’ve made a misconfiguration until they notify you to say that your budget is 5,000% over — happy, smiley face,” Seeberg says.
- More efficient hardware configuration from running on bare metal. “We have applications for ingesting Google merchant feeds, for example, that might contain half a million products and consume vast amounts of RAM for traversal, but don't actually need much CPU.” Bare metal servers provide iPaper with additional flexibility for server rightsizing compared with AWS.
- A platform that supports automation. Because Cycle is fully API-driven, iPaper is building towards a future where nobody needs to log into the Cycle dashboard directly. The team is integrating Cycle into its own internal deployment tooling, allowing engineers to trigger deployments via Slack or internal tools rather than navigating a web console.
- Multi-provider flexibility. Cycle’s ability to span multiple hardware providers — Scaleway, Cherry Servers, and others alongside OVH — means that iPaper is not locked into a single vendor for compute, even if storage constraints currently keep it close to OVH.
Perhaps the most meaningful outcome is around compliance. Approximately 18 months before migration completed, iPaper told its customers it was actively moving away from AWS. The response was positive. In late 2024, it issued updated Data Processing Agreements to its full customer base, naming new entities and signalling that by mid-2026, all US entities would be removed entirely.
“That has been met with high praise from the very few customers who responded; the rest were non-responsive,” Seeberg laughs.
Contracts that had previously stalled because of AWS are now moving forward. The DPA update is a concrete, auditable signal to enterprise procurement and legal teams that iPaper takes European data seriously.
Once the migration of the older app is complete, storage is the next frontier: OVH’s Ceph offering is limited to a single data center, and iPaper is already thinking about what a multi-region, fully European storage story looks like. “We’re looking forward to removing AWS completely,” Seeberg says.
But for a company of iPaper’s size — ambitious scale, lean team, European customer base with real compliance requirements — the combination of bare metal, a coherent orchestration platform, and genuine data sovereignty has proven to be a better fit than the sprawling complexity of a hyperscale cloud.
“Cycle has been less about working around random issues and more about building things,” Seeberg concludes. “For us, that’s the whole point.”
iPaper serves approximately 1,000 retail publishers across Europe and the Americas, delivering interactive digital catalogues to 100 million unique visits per month.