SUSE Allies with evroc for European Cloud Service Based on Kubernetes
SUSE today revealed it has allied with evroc to provide a sovereign cloud based on its Kubernetes platform that in the first quarter of 2026 will be hosted in Europe by a cloud service provider.
Frank Feldman, chief strategy officer for SUSE, said that alliance with evroc might be extended to other types of platform based on customer demand. In the meantime, organizations building cloud-native applications that need to be deployed in Europe now have an option that complies with the EuroStack IT framework for building sovereign cloud hosted in Europe that was rolled out earlier this year.
At the core of the SUSE platform running on the evroc cloud are instances of SUSE Linux Enterprise or SUSE Linux Micro on which the SUSE Rancher Prime platform, based on Kubernetes clusters, has been deployed.
Additionally, SUSE will provide a premium support option that ensures only European personnel are relied on to augment IT teams.
EuroStack is a collection of initiatives through which an independent European digital infrastructure that limits dependence on vendors not based in Europe is being advanced. While in theory, a sovereign cloud could be created and managed by a cloud service provider based in the U.S., recent political tensions has created a sense of urgency in Europe for platforms that are not provided by organizations in the U.S. that might be subject to the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act passed by Congress in 2018.
Managing an independent stack of software on a separate cloud will, of course, increase costs for organizations that previously relied on a global provider of cloud services to make their applications available anywhere in the world, but as countries enact sovereign cloud laws and policies, the running of an entirely separate set of platforms is increasing costs.
Less clear is to what degree sovereign clouds might become a global phenomenon as other countries determine that it is not in their best interest to be dependent on IT platforms and services provided by vendors that are subject to the policies of another government even when the software deployed and the data stored resides within their borders. In theory, cloud computing as it is known today could become a series of loosely connected on-premises IT environments that are being managed in isolation from one another.
Naturally, that shift bodes well for cloud service providers that have focused on specific geographic markets, many of whom are now finding themselves being better protected from international rivals.
The implications of that shift are especially profound for any provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) application that today spans multiple availability services running in different geographies to provide 24/7 access to their software.
Hopefully, cooler heads will eventually prevail but in the short term at least IT teams should assume that it will be a while before trust between governments is, if ever, restored. In fact, providers of application services should expect the organizations they serve to be asking a lot more pointed questions about not only where data is stored, but also how the entire IT environment is managed on an end-to-end basis.
