Swiss sovereignty, by design

Managed Kubernetes runs on Swiss sovereign infrastructure from the first iteration. Your workloads and the cluster control plane stay in Switzerland, under Swiss law, with no dependency on a US or other foreign hyperscaler. Sovereignty here is a property of the platform, not an add-on.

Where it runs: Cloudscale

The first iteration runs on Cloudscale, an independent Swiss cloud provider that operates its data centers exclusively in Switzerland. Why that matters:

• Data location. Your cluster data and persistent storage stay physically in Switzerland. Cloudscale runs two cloud locations, both in Switzerland.
• Certified security management. Cloudscale's information security management system is certified to ISO/IEC 27001, 27017 and 27018, and an ISAE 3000 report is available on request.
• Governing law. Cloudscale is a Swiss company operating under Swiss law. There is no foreign operator in the chain and no exposure to extraterritorial legislation such as the US CLOUD Act.
• No hyperscaler dependency. The platform does not lean on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud primitives. You are not tied to a hyperscaler's networking, IAM, or storage model.
• Infrastructure from Cloudscale, the cluster from us. Cloudscale sells the infrastructure and the Kubernetes integration for it, a CSI storage driver and a cloud controller manager. Running the cluster on top is left to you, or to us. VSHN already runs production clusters there: one of the two APPUiO Cloud zones is on Cloudscale in Lupfig.

Additional Swiss sovereign providers may follow, driven by demand from early-access participants. The platform is built to be portable across Swiss infrastructure rather than locked to one provider's proprietary services.

Register interest

What makes the stack sovereign

Sovereignty is not only about where the servers are. It is also about what runs on them and who controls it.

Immutable OS on Talos Linux

The platform runs on Talos Linux, an immutable, API-managed Kubernetes operating system. There is no SSH and no shell on the nodes; the entire system is configured through a declarative API. That eliminates configuration drift and shrinks the attack surface, and it means the OS layer is fully reproducible and auditable rather than hand-maintained.

An upgrade replaces the whole image. The OS and Kubernetes move to a new version together, and the previous image stays on the node to boot back into.

Open source, end to end

Every layer of the platform is open source: Talos, Cluster API, Cilium, the Gateway API, and Rook with Ceph. There is no proprietary enterprise licensing in the orchestration stack. Open source is a sovereignty property in its own right: you are not dependent on a single vendor's roadmap, licensing terms, or ability to continue supporting the product.

The same stack runs on your own hardware

Talos Linux is free under the MPL-2.0 license, with no license key and no subscription. It runs on bare metal, VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Proxmox and OpenStack as well as on public clouds, and Cluster API, Cilium and Rook with Ceph run there too. So the platform you rent from us is one you could run yourself: in your own data center, or with another operator.

Your workloads talk to the standard Kubernetes API, the Gateway API and CSI storage, so nothing in them is written against an interface only we offer.

Talos is developed by Sidero Labs, a US company, and it is the one foreign vendor in the stack. Sidero Labs has no access to your cluster or to what runs on it, and no way to switch it off. The MPL-2.0 license lets anyone build and run Talos without a contract with them.

Operated by a Swiss company

VSHN is a Swiss company based in Zurich, operating Kubernetes in production since 2016. Cloudscale is a Swiss company based in Zurich too. So the whole contract chain is Swiss: you sign with VSHN, VSHN procures the infrastructure from Cloudscale, both contracts are under Swiss law, and the data centers are in Switzerland. If your organization needs the cloud subscription in its own name, that contract is with a Swiss company as well.

Where the companies sit and who touches your systems are two separate facts. By default, VSHN Canada does scheduled night-time work. With the Swiss-only support option, all access to your systems is from Switzerland.

What sovereignty does and does not mean here

Managed Kubernetes is a deliberately bounded, business-hours service. It gives you Swiss data residency, Swiss governing law, and an open-source stack on independent Swiss infrastructure. It is not a regulated-grade enterprise platform with continuous around-the-clock operations. If your workloads require that, Managed OpenShift is the better fit. Being honest about that boundary is itself part of a trustworthy sovereignty story.

Next steps

Sovereignty is one of the main reasons teams move to Swiss-operated Kubernetes. If keeping your clusters under Swiss law matters to you, register your interest and tell us about your requirements.