One platform — standardized, built and operated by many.
One platform — standardized, built and operated by many.
The Sovereign Cloud Stack project, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action will release its third version of the SCS reference implementation R2 on March 23, 2022. Highlights of Release 2, to whose success a community of over 20 companies have contributed are updates of the integrated open source components, the simplified deployment on bare metal, significantly improved management of Kubernetes clusters, as well as the technical foundations for connecting to the Gaia-X Federation Services (GXFS).
Defined and implemented in an open development process, the technology of Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) is being tested by a growing number of companies and public IT service providers. In addition, two (soon three) providers are already using SCS in production environments to offer public cloud services. The C5 certification of our partner plusserver also proves that the Sovereign Cloud Stack meets the high security requirements of the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).
By participating in the working groups of Gaia-X and the Deutsche Verwaltungscloud-Strategie (DVS) the Sovereign Cloud Stack project ensures that the project’s jointly developed standards and reference implementation also meet the requirements from these key initiatives. The Sovereign Cloud Stack thus forms not only a technical foundation for Gaia-X compliant infrastructure, but also for a resilient, federatable public sector cloud.
The key points for Release 3, due in the fall of 2022, will be the completion of the disk encryption feature, the expansion of federation capabilities, and the development of fully automated SCS conformance tests. The latter are intended to enable already established cloud service providers to adapt and validate their own offerings to the established SCS standards.
The goal of Sovereign Cloud Stack is to develop a fully open-source toolkit for sovereign, standardized cloud & container infrastructure. Consumers of such infrastructure can thus painlessly manage services across multiple SCS-compliant offerings.
Through open source, open standards, and an open development process, Sovereign Cloud Stack makes an important contribution to minimize lock-in effects in the cloud business, creating freedom of choice and thus strengthening the progress of digitalization in Europe - with full control over technology and data.
Peter Ganten, Chairman of the Board of the Open Source Business Alliance e.V.
In detail, the following technical highlights, among others, were realized with Release 2:
Update of core components to OpenStack Xena, OSISM 3.0.0, and Kubernetes Cluster API 1.0.x with added support for Kubernetes 1.22 and 1.23.
Automation of bare metal deployment has been massively extended. The configuration of the components is now managed by NetBox as central source of truth. This means that setups with a high number of machines can be deployed with a manageable operational effort.
The Kubernetes Cluster API-based automation for managing Kubernetes clusters is now designed to manage many differently configured clusters. Clusters can now be created in different projects and availability zones and are also independent of each other’s configuration. This allows for different Kubernetes versions, different network integration (CNI), different numbers and flavors of machines as well as an independent selection of standard services. The configuration can be maintained in a git repository.
Standard services within Kubernetes container management have been extended by flux (gitops) and cert-manager (certificate management), the ingress-nginx has been enhanced and cilium can now be used instead of calico for the cluster network integration. DevOps teams thus do not have to worry about integration of these components.
The quality of our stack is constantly assured by conformance tests of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the Open Infrastructure Foundation.
The SCS standards for image metadata and machine flavor naming published with Release 1 have been fully implemented. Thus, it is easier to develop automated installations (Infrastructure-as-Code) without having to deal with numerous little differences for different cloud offerings.
The required components to connect to the Gaia-X Federation Services (GXFS) have been completed. The Gaia-X Federation Services will allow to connect the various Gaia-X services. Thus, a very important milestone of SCS for Gaia-X has been reached.
The full release notes will be available on GitHub at https://github.com/SovereignCloudStack/Docs/ as of Wednesday.
The Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) was launched in 2019 and initially funded by the
Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovations - SPRIND. Since July 2021, SCS is a
project of the Open Source Business Alliance and receives funding by the German
Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK, formerly BMWi).
A growing community of more than 20 companies contribute to the success of Sovereign
Cloud Stack. By joining forces, standards for a modern, federatable open source
cloud and container platform are defined and implemented by using proven open source
components. At the same time, operational knowledge and
The Open Source Business Alliance (OSB Alliance) is the association of the open source industry in Germany. We represent over 170 member companies that employ approximately 10,000 people and generate more than 1.7 billion euros annually in Germany. Together with scientific institutions and user organisations, we are committed to sustainably anchoring the central importance of open source software and open standards for a successful digital transformation in the public awareness. This digital transformation should benefit companies, the state and society alike. In addition, innovations in the field of open source should be promoted. Our goal is to establish open source as the standard in public procurement and in research and business promotion. After all, open source and open standards are essential foundations for digital sovereignty, innovative capacity and security in the digital transformation and thus the answer to one of the greatest challenges of our time.