One platform — standardized, built and operated by many.
One platform — standardized, built and operated by many.
Berlin, 2024-12-17: The GovStack initiative provides guidelines and frameworks supporting countries in their digital transformation by provinding them with building blocks (BB) that help to provide digital services to their citizens. To this end, several working groups publish cross-cutting requirements, building blocks and technical specifications. One of the youngest building block is the Cloud Infrastructure Building Block Specification.
As a non-profit project Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) was able to participate in the working group Cloud Infrastructure. The SCS project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Action (BMWK) to develop a production-ready, open source cloud infrastructure and container stack, and to provide open standards and operational knowledge. The results of the working group was now published in a first version of recommendations for building digital sovereign cloud infrastructure. With this blueprint, governments and their technical teams have a framework for their own clouds. With this framework, they can build a secure and and reliable cloud using the model that integrates with their digital strategy – a lot of governments tend to use private clouds, but for scalability or as an offering for regional businesses they can use the same technology for public or hybrid clouds.
Both projects share the same mindset on digital sovereignty which made collaboration very effective. Both want to empower their cloud and software users to be sovereign in their decisions on their digital transformation, in their choices of technology, and in their ability to control and design this technology. With the GovStack building block framework, governments can offer their citizens various digital services, based on sovereign cloud infrastructure. This is an important step for each country (including Germany). Many aspects of daily life are digital or digitally supported, and to be able to control their digital space themselves, to shape, and to develop it without unintended lock-in helps countries to strengthen their confidence, to be on par with larger nations.
SCS is completing the picture of GovStack on the practical level – the SCS software covers almost all requirements and recommendations of the specifications (two requirements marked as “recommendation” are not fulfilled, which can be clearly seen here) and thus becomes a reference implementation of the specs. So, the SCS community and partners are able to support countries to implement their cloud infrastructure – as they want to shape it, in the countries or with trusted hosters. So, SCS is used like it was intended: digitally sovereign, open source, mature cloud infrastructure. For government clouds, for regional OSPOs, as base for a global network, developed by a global, diverse community.
The first collaborations with countries already started in Mauretania, Jordan, Djibuti, Kenia, Somalia. In these countries GovStack supports the governments with their digital transformation, with the opportunity for the countries to host their applications and services in their own sovereign cloud.
About the Sovereign Cloud Stack Project SCS has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Action (BMWK) since July 2021 and is carried out by the Open Source Business Alliance - Bundesverband für digitale Souveränität e.V.. An international ecosystem of now over 25 companies contributes to the success of the Sovereign Cloud Stack with over 50 software developers. Together, open standards for a modern, federatable open source cloud and container platform are defined and implemented in an open development process using proven open source components. At the same time, operational knowledge and practice is being made transparently available to minimize the difficulty of delivering high-quality and secure cloud services. Already seven providers are using SCS technology productively to operate truly sovereign and GDPR-compliant public cloud offerings. Additional SCS-based cloud infrastructure (public and private clouds) is under construction. SCS is a Lighthouse Project of Gaia-X and provides the development platform for the Gaia-X Federation Services / Cross-Federation Service Components (GXFS/XFSC), and contributes to the German Administrative Cloud of the federal and state governments (Deutsche Verwaltungscloud DVC).
About the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) e.V. The Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) is the association of the open source industry in Germany. It represents over 200 member companies that generate more than EUR 126 billion annually in total. Together with scientific institutions and user organizations, it works to sustainably anchor the central importance of open source software and open standards for a successful digital transformation in the public awareness. In addition, innovations in the field of open source are to be promoted. The goal of the OSBA is to establish open source as a standard in public procurement and in research and business development. After all, open source and open standards are compelling foundations for digital sovereignty, innovation capability and security in the digital transformation and thus the answer to one of the greatest challenges of our time.
About GovStack GovStack is a global partnership that enables countries and organisations to create cost-effective, efficient and locally tailored digital public services that provide seamless access to critical tools such as health data, identity documents or digital payments. For the use of reusable and interoperable building blocks - such as digital identity, registries, consent, payment and cloud infrastructure - GovStack provides technical specifications, tools and guidance that form the basis for various digital services. GovStack is committed to product neutrality, providing open, customizable frameworks instead of offering ready-made software or promoting specific product solutions over others. By adopting this approach, GovStack ensures governments receive flexible support tailored to every phase of their digital transformation.
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