Core Concepts
A small number of concepts are enough to understand how Open Sovereign Cloud is organized.
Region
A region is a self-contained OSC deployment. It has its own compute, network, storage and platform services and forms the main operational and data-location boundary for customer workloads.
Availability Zone
Each OSC region is divided into three Availability Zones. An Availability Zone is a physically separated location within the region. Customers can spread worker pools and applications across zones to reduce the impact of a single-site failure.
Project
A project is an administrative boundary for teams, permissions and Kubernetes clusters. Projects help customers separate environments such as development, staging and production and determine who may view or manage the resources inside them.
Shoot Cluster
A Shoot cluster is the Kubernetes cluster used by the customer. Applications, namespaces, services and workloads run in the Shoot. Gardener creates and manages the cluster on behalf of OSC.
Worker Pool
A worker pool is a group of Kubernetes worker nodes with a common machine configuration. It defines properties such as size, scaling range, Kubernetes node settings and zone placement. A cluster can contain several worker pools for different workload profiles.
Managed Control Plane
The Kubernetes control plane of a Shoot is operated by OSC. It runs in a provider-managed Seed environment and includes the Kubernetes API server, etcd and the core control-plane components. Customers consume the API but do not operate the control-plane infrastructure themselves.
Seed and Garden
Gardener uses a Garden, Seed and Shoot model. The Garden coordinates the managed Kubernetes service. Seeds host the control planes of customer Shoots. Shoots are the customer-facing Kubernetes clusters. Customers usually need to understand Shoots in detail; Garden and Seed remain part of the managed service.
Dedicated Compute and Shared Regional Services
Customer worker nodes run on customer-specific compute pools. Networking and storage are regional platform services shared across tenants with technical isolation between environments. This model combines dedicated compute capacity with the efficiency and elasticity of a cloud platform.