STACKIT is the German cloud platform owned by Schwarz Group, Europe's largest retailer encompassing brands like Lidl and Kaufland. Schwarz Group has annual revenues of over €130 billion and 575,000 employees. STACKIT’s vision is a secure, simple, and stable cloud for European companies.
STACKIT is building a sovereign European cloud. By keeping data always encrypted and verifiably secure, even when running workloads on third-party infrastructure, confidential computing fits perfectly with STACKIT’s mission and customer requirements.
The company already had the right hardware with confidential-computing CPUs from AMD. For enabling these features on OpenStack at scale and with a user-friendly Kubernetes-based, STACKIT partnered with Edgeless Systems.
Edgeless Systems supported STACKIT to set up confidential VMs (CVMs) on OpenStack. Next, the two partners integrated Constellation, the always-encrypted Kubernetes, into the cloud user portal with full billing and support integration. Constellation is a CNCF-certified Kubernetes engine that leverages confidential computing to isolate entire Kubernetes deployments from the underlying infrastructure. Constellation makes sure that data is always encrypted: in-use with CVMs, at-rest by adding transparently encrypted storage, and in-transit with attested TLS. For DevOps teams, Constellation provides a simple Kubernetes user experience without any code changes. It even comes with a dedicated Terraform provider. The security of a Kubernetes cluster can also be verified, using CPU-based remote attestation.
By working with Edgeless Systems, STACKIT was able to launch leading confidential-computing solutions from scratch in only a few months, providing complete infrastructure isolation, and adding more features to its sovereign cloud offering. STACKIT now offers STACKIT Confidential Kubernetes and STACKIT Confidential Server. If you want to learn more, please contact us or the great team at STACKIT.
