The cloud is omnipresent. Hardly any company can do without external (public) or their own (private) cloud solutions. But what are the standards for a "good cloud"? And what does customer sovereignty mean for the cloud operator? The Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) is addressing these questions as a partner in the European Gaia-X project. For Gaia-X, the SCS is developing measures to create interoperability between existing European cloud systems. Regional cloud providers already comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but do not yet follow a uniform standard that guarantees the transparency, interoperability and independence from third-party interests that users require. A brief look back: Gaia-X was launched to create a protected data space for critical infrastructures and to enable the exchange of sensitive data across government and company boundaries. To this end, the SCS project has created a standardized framework for regional cloud providers that clearly differentiate themselves from the large cloud providers and work closely together to create a blueprint for a secure, open and interoperable cloud that complies with European values. SCS is therefore something of a common infrastructure platform based on established open source tools such as OpenStack, Kubernetes, etc. Many of these standards were not new to the ScaleUp team and were more or less already implemented by us. ScaleUp has been an integral part of the SCS movement for several months and is actively and creatively contributing its experience to the implementation of the required standards.
Where does the Sovereign Cloud Stack currently stand?
The SCS project has published its sixth release. However, it is currently still in the initial phase, in which small to medium-sized regional cloud providers are pooling their resources and expertise. Although the SCS framework lays the foundation for a uniform standard, there is still a lot for early adopters to do. The framework needs to be further tested with sufficient use cases.
Our contribution to the project
ScaleUp is actively working on building an SCS-compatible cloud infrastructure with a focus on sustainability - an aspect that sets it apart from traditional cloud solutions. The ongoing projects are critical to the success of the SCS project, as it depends on the participation of multiple providers to build a diverse ecosystem of SCS-compatible, open clouds.
In return, ScaleUp benefits from the close cooperation and exchange of operational know-how with SCS supporting partners. We are convinced that the open exchange of knowledge benefits all parties involved and strengthens the joint efforts to create viable alternatives to dominant cloud platforms such as AWS that are environmentally friendly, accessible and also data protection compliant.
