What is the Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS)?
The dominance of global hyperscalers in the cloud market leads to structural dependencies. Companies outsource workloads, but increasingly find themselves in vendor lock-in due to proprietary interfaces, opaque pricing models, and legal uncertainty regarding data sovereignty (US CLOUD Act).
The Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) is the industry's answer to this problem. It's a vendor-neutral, open-source standard for building and operating cloud infrastructure. The goal of the SCS is to guarantee true cloud sovereignty by providing a standardized platform that can be operated consistently by different providers.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
OpenStack forms the foundation. This layer orchestrates the fundamental resources such as compute, network, and storage.
Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS)
Built on top of the IaaS layer, the KaaS layer enables the automated provisioning and management of Kubernetes clusters for modern, container-based workloads.
These layers interact in a controlled way, providing developers and administrators with a standardized API environment.
The architecture: IaaS, KaaS, and OpenStack
Technologically, the Sovereign Cloud Stack is a complete software stack covering the fundamental layers of modern cloud environments. It deliberately avoids proprietary software solutions and instead builds on proven open-source technologies.
Two core components define the architecture:
Interoperability and standards compliance
The biggest advantage of the SCS is its strict interoperability. Because the interfaces and base software are standardized and certified by the SCS project, a workload developed on one SCS cloud runs identically on another provider's SCS cloud.
This standards compliance is the most effective protection against vendor lock-in. You retain your choice of different third-party providers and can switch your infrastructure if needed, without having to rewrite your application architecture.
SCS as part of the Gaia-X ecosystem
The Sovereign Cloud Stack is not just a relevant technical project, it is also highly relevant strategically and politically. The SCS is an essential technical pillar of the Gaia-X ecosystem, the European initiative to build a secure, sovereign, and federated data infrastructure. The SCS provides the technical foundation to translate Gaia-X's values into real data centers. The "Deutschland-Stack" is also based on the SCS standard.
infra:u and the Sovereign Cloud Stack
UPONU is committed to open technology. Our infra:u Cloud Stack closely follows the standards and principles of the Sovereign Cloud Stack. We provide this standardized platform on our own, controlled hardware in German data centers.
For you, that means: you use an infrastructure that guarantees absolute data sovereignty, protects against vendor lock-in, and gives you full control over your IT strategy back.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
The SCS is a standardized open-source software stack for building cloud platforms. It solves the problem of dependency (vendor lock-in) on individual proprietary vendors and hyperscalers by ensuring compatibility and interchangeability between different cloud providers.
With the massive price increases from providers like VMware and growing political dependencies, companies are looking for alternatives. The Sovereign Cloud Stack, based on KVM and OpenStack, offers a full-featured, open, enterprise-grade alternative for managing virtual machines.
Yes. Through strict certification of the APIs and the underlying open-source technologies, workloads are guaranteed to remain portable. Switching to another cloud provider that also offers SCS is possible without any changes to the software architecture.
Very. Since the SCS is based on established standards such as OpenStack, Kubernetes, Ceph, and KVM, it integrates excellently into existing open-source workflows (e.g. Terraform, Ansible).
Do you have more questions? Contact us
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