LF Member European Forum 2026

Open Source Software (OSS) has been very successful in bringing together contributors, crossing organizational, cultural, regional borders. Clouds combine a lot of technology into cohesive platforms and are thus harder. Big Tech uses a lot of OSS, but ultimately combines it into highly proprietary platforms built to lock-in customers into vendor-specific APIs and service sets. To compete successfully without the vast amount of financial resources, strong collaboration practices and a powerful vision is needed to motivate the broad cross-project work.

Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) is a European initiative that creates an open, transparent, and vendor-neutral cloud ecosystem that guarantees sovereignty. SCS is based on certifiable standards, a modular software stack, and practical knowledge transfer. The project is steered by a community project board with standardization and certification overseen by the Forum SCS-Standards.

Standing on the shoulders of giants, it builds on top of many successful open-source components, such as OpenStack and Kubernetes. The certifiable standards assure that workloads can be switched easily between cloud environments that are SCS-compatible.