Collaboration of ALASCA and SCS

The Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) project is a platform for open collaboration where a provider-focused ecosystem collaborates to create and operate cloud and container technology together in order to support their customers to achieve higher levels of Digital Sovereignty. Common certifiable standards, a fully open modular reference implementation and transparency and knowledge sharing for operational processes are main outcomes from this collaboration. SCS is a project by the OSB Alliance e.V. and funded by the BMWK (German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action).

While the reference implementation of course instantiates and also inspires the standards, these can be implemented independently by other open (or even non-open) implementations. This way preexisting environments can become fully SCS-compatible platforms. On the other hand, new technology can be integrated, resulting in more modern fully-compliant implementations before possibly becoming mainstream at a later point in time. This can happen at all layers and all components of the stack. Obviously, the stronger the divergence, the smaller the benefits for the operators from the joint creation of technology and operational practices, but the tradeoffs can vary for different operators.

Cloud&Heat Technologies has been supporting and contributing to Sovereign Cloud Stack since a long time. Cloud&Heat has also joined the OSB Alliance to strengthen its support for Open Source. Cloud&Heat and Sovereign Cloud Stack also have been working together in various Gaia-X groups and proposals for the upcoming IPCEI-CIS. A particular joint activity by the authors in this overall context was a talk provided at the Open Infrastructure Summit in 2020 stating a common motivation for open infrastructure in general and a project such as the SCS specifically (see recording¹).

While the stacks built and operated by Cloud&Heat do diverge in several details from the SCS reference implementation, joint technology is being developed and, more importantly, standardization happens together, with the goal to have fully SCS-compliant stacks also built by Cloud&Heat with some distinct implementation choices.

Cloud&Heat has been developing yaook, a modern Kubernetes based life-cycle management solution for OpenStack together with STACKIT and other partners from the ALASCA association. After open-sourcing it, giving it a home for further development with a good open governance model is an important motivation to set up a lean non-profit organization that can focus on pushing forward the yaook development and perspectively development of further related projects.

This move creates extended opportunities for yaook to grow and opens a way for intensified and structured collaboration between SCS and the broader set of yaook partners around ALASCA. We will continue to work on joint technology and speed up the standardization efforts. As soon as we have achieved a solid state, we want to create SCS reference blueprints that leverage yaook technology, showcasing that indeed the SCS standards can be implemented in more than one way.