A European Cloud Reckoning: Why Hybrid Sovereignty Demands New Thinking—And New Tools
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A European Cloud Reckoning: Why Hybrid Sovereignty Demands New Thinking—And New Tools
The recent WIRED article on Europe’s growing discomfort with U.S. cloud giants highlights a critical inflection point in the evolution of global digital infrastructure. While the piece rightly underscores rising political tensions and sovereignty concerns in the wake of the Trump administration’s policies, the underlying challenge goes deeper than geopolitics: today’s hyperscale cloud models were not designed for the world we now live in—diverse, decentralized, data-intensive, and AI-driven.
At Mirantis, we’ve spent over a decade helping enterprises take control of their infrastructure—across private clouds, public clouds, and edge environments—by embracing open source, cloud-native principles. With the launch of k0rdent, our open-source Distributed Container Management Environment (DCME), we are delivering on a vision of infrastructure independence, one rooted not in ideology, but in technical and operational pragmatism.
The Rise of the Hybrid Sovereign Cloud
The article captures a real and accelerating shift: European governments and enterprises are actively rethinking where and how they run their critical workloads. But while calls for “European alternatives” are growing louder, the path to sovereign cloud isn’t a binary choice between ditching U.S. providers or going it alone. It’s about building hybrid, multi-cloud, multi-cluster environments that give organizations the flexibility to meet their own security, regulatory, and performance requirements—without being forced into rigid architectural or geopolitical corners.
Delivering this kind of hybrid sovereignty is immensely complex. Data needs to live in specific regions. Applications must be portable but also secure, compliant, and observable. Developers need a seamless experience across environments—without being buried under an avalanche of inconsistent tooling or fragmented APIs. And in 2025, AI workloads are compounding the challenge, introducing GPU scheduling, model lifecycle management, and cost optimization concerns that most traditional platforms were never built to handle.
This is the problem space k0rdent was built for.
A New Control Plane for the Real World
k0rdent is a 100% open-source system that brings declarative automation, standardized templates, and composable infrastructure orchestration to platform engineering teams. It provides a single point of control for managing Kubernetes clusters, services, and cost/observability tooling—across any cloud, any location, and any infrastructure.
It integrates with ClusterAPI to support a growing list of providers, including AWS, Azure, OpenStack, and VMware, as well as bare metal. And thanks to our partnership with GCore, we’re demonstrating how k0rdent can be used to rapidly deploy sovereign AI infrastructure on European soil, managed by European teams, with European policy enforcement and data residency guarantees.
This isn’t just about spinning up clusters. k0rdent delivers what we call “Golden Paths”—curated, validated, and secure deployment templates for cloud-native services and AI workloads. These templates help platform teams ensure compliance, repeatability, and developer velocity, while retaining full control over architecture and configuration. It’s a modular, scalable approach to infrastructure-as-code that works whether you’re building a centralized national cloud or deploying inference workloads to the edge.
More Than Software: A Trusted Partner
Software is only half the story. Mirantis has a long pedigree delivering production-grade, mission-critical cloud infrastructure at scale—for financial institutions, telecoms, public sector agencies, and global SaaS companies. We know how to navigate the intersection of technical architecture, regulatory policy, and operational resilience.
Through our services and support offerings, we help customers define migration paths, manage multi-cloud complexity, secure their supply chains, and ensure ongoing compliance with evolving frameworks like GDPR, DORA, and NIS2. We will also be introducing enterprise packaging that includes full SBOMs, vulnerability scanning, cryptographic signing, and 24/7 SLAs—critical for organizations who can’t afford uncertainty in their cloud stack.
The Road Ahead
The WIRED article makes it clear that sovereignty isn’t a slogan—it’s a need. But sovereignty can’t come at the expense of agility. As European institutions look to assert digital independence, they must also stay competitive in the global economy. That means enabling developers, supporting AI innovation, and deploying scalable infrastructure where it’s needed most: from the cloud, to the data center, to the edge.
k0rdent offers a way forward. It doesn’t replace the public cloud; it complements it. It doesn’t limit choice; it expands it. And it doesn’t fragment developer experience; it unifies it under open, auditable, and composable frameworks.
The future is not one cloud, but many. And it’s time we built platforms that reflect that reality.
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