#Product and Architecture Overview

Open Sovereign Cloud is built in layers, but customers should not have to operate those layers individually.

At the top are customer applications and platform services. They run in one or more customer Shoot clusters. These clusters are the product boundary customers interact with every day.

Below the Shoot sits the managed Kubernetes layer. Gardener creates the cluster, hosts its control plane in a Seed and keeps the declared cluster state reconciled over time. It also connects the cluster to the compute, network and storage services provided by OSC.

The infrastructure layer supplies worker machines, virtual networks, persistent volumes, object storage, load balancers and external connectivity. Internally, OSC uses IronCore and Kubernetes-based infrastructure APIs to manage these resources. IronCore is an implementation layer of the service rather than a separate customer-facing IaaS product, so its operational complexity remains abstracted from customers.

At the bottom is the physical regional platform. It spans three Availability Zones and contains compute nodes, storage nodes, network fabrics, routers and separate management infrastructure. OSC operates this foundation and its lifecycle.

This separation is deliberate. Customers receive Kubernetes as a service without needing to understand bare-metal provisioning, internal IaaS controllers or the physical network design. At the same time, the platform remains transparent enough for architects and security teams to understand where workloads run and how isolation is achieved.