Open Sovereign Cloud

What is Open Sovereign Cloud?

Open Sovereign Cloud is a managed cloud platform built for organizations that need modern Kubernetes without giving up control over data, operations or technology choices.

The primary product is managed Kubernetes. Customers create Kubernetes clusters for their applications through the OSC Console or Kubernetes-native APIs. OSC provisions the required infrastructure, hosts and operates the Kubernetes control planes, connects storage and networking, and manages the supported lifecycle of the platform.

OSC is operated in the European Union and is based on an open-source technology stack. Gardener provides the managed Kubernetes layer, while IronCore powers the infrastructure automation underneath. Both are developed openly as part of the NeoNephos ecosystem. This reduces dependency on proprietary hyperscaler services and gives customers a clearer path to portability, auditability and long-term control.

What customers receive

A customer environment combines managed Kubernetes with the cloud services needed to run production workloads. This includes:

  • compute capacity
  • private networks
  • external connectivity
  • load balancing
  • persistent block storage and object storage.

Optional services can extend the environment with capabilities such as private connectivity or confidential computing.

Compute capacity is provided from customer-specific machine pools. The physical hosts, virtualization layer and infrastructure orchestration remain part of the managed platform. Customers work with Kubernetes worker pools rather than with the underlying bare-metal systems.

What OSC operates

OSC operates the regional infrastructure, the internal cloud control planes and the Gardener-based Kubernetes management layer. This includes:

  • hardware lifecycle
  • network and storage services
  • provisioning
  • monitoring of the platform
  • and supported upgrades of managed components.

Customers remain in control of their Kubernetes workloads. They decide how applications are deployed, how namespaces and permissions are organized, how workloads are distributed across zones and how application-level resilience is implemented.

Sovereign by Design

Open Sovereign Cloud is built on three pillars of digital sovereignty:

  • Operational Sovereignty: The customer retains full control over the operation of their cloud infrastructure and applications. Operations are carried out exclusively from Europe. In addition, Confidential Computing enables the consistent exclusion of the managed service provider, which means unauthorized access to your data is technically prevented.
  • Data Sovereignty: Customers’ data remains entirely under their control, stored in German data centers and operated by European providers. The customer independently manages the encryption, access, and use of their data, including all metadata.
  • Technological Sovereignty: By using open-source technologies, OSC remains independent of non-European software providers. No proprietary interfaces, no dependencies, and full portability for your applications and data.

Kubernetes centered

Open Sovereign Cloud is built around Kubernetes, using it as the core platform for operating, managing, and scaling cloud-native workloads. For Kubernetes cluster management, OSC relies on Gardener, which delivers Kubernetes clusters as a service and is deeply rooted in Kubernetes-native principles. As an open-source project within the CNCF landscape, Gardener is a natural fit for running and managing cloud-based software.

Gardener

To understand the core architecture management within OSC, we need to layout Gardener principles of cluster management.

Gardener uses a so called Seed cluster to host the control plane (API server, scheduler, controllers, etcd persistence, etc.) of an end-user’s workload cluster, the so called Shoot cluster as pods. This allows one Seed cluster to host the control planes of multiple Shoot clusters. This approach eliminates the need for dedicated hardware or virtual machines for the Shoot cluster control planes.

Therefore, the control plane is hosted in pods/containers watched by the Seed cluster, allowing them to be deployed with a replica count of 1 and scaled out only when the control plane is under pressure, eliminating the need for high availability (HA) reasons. This approach simplifies the deployments (standard Kubernetes deployment) and makes updates easier (standard Kubernetes rolling update).

The Shoot cluster is composed solely of worker nodes (with no control plane), allowing users to have full administrative access to their clusters. Moreover, on OSC, we manage a central cluster used to provision and operate all Garden clusters in an OSC region and provide internal central services such as monitoring, logging, and DNS.

For more details on the Gardener approach itself and general architecture, please refer to the upstream Gardener documentation.