The Linux Foundation Europe consortium this week launched a separate NeoNephos Foundation that is chartered with building a sovereign cloud for organizations operating with the European Union (EU) based on open source technologies.
Intended to align with a $1.2 billion Important Project of Common European Interest Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI-CIS EU) initiative launched by the EU at the end of 2023, the NeoNephos Foundation is being founded by Clyso GmbH, Cyberus Technology, Deutsche Telekom AG, SAP SE, TNO – ECOFED and 23 Technologies GmbH. It aims to serve as a hub for developing and promoting open source software.
Mirko Boehm, senior director for community development at the Linux Foundation Europe, said, the NeoNephos Foundation will define architectures for building cloud computing environments using open source software such as Kubernetes and OpenStack to enable organizations to build and deploy multiple types of applications.
The organizations that founded the NeoNephos Foundation are all providers of application and IT infrastructure services, but as it evolves, more end user organizations are expected to join, noted Boehm.
The NeoNephos Foundation will also help advance projects such as Gardener, a framework for automating the management of Kubernetes clusters that after initially being developed by SAP is now being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, another arm of The Linux Foundation.
The overall goal is to provide a neutral governance body for fostering Pan-European collaboration in a way that improves the integration of multiple open source technologies, Boehm said.
As an arm of the Linux Foundation, the NeoNephos Foundation is however committed to ensuring that as much compatibility with open source software being advanced by any unit of the Linux Foundation is maintained.
The launch comes at a time when global tensions are rising in the wake of a trade war initiated by the Trump administration. Many organizations based in Europe are, as a result, trying to lessen their dependency on technologies from vendors based in the U.S. that might one day be prevented from serving European customers. In essence, many organizations around the world are becoming more cautious about using software created by IT vendors in the U.S. that could get caught up in a global trade war.
Europe, of course, is not the only country or economic region defining frameworks for building sovereign clouds. Most providers of cloud services already provide access to a sovereign cloud that ensures data does not leave a specific region. The NeoNephos Foundation takes the effort to another level by encouraging organizations to rely only on open source software to build those clouds.
It’s still early days so far as the building and deployment of sovereign clouds is concerned but there is likely IT teams that will encounter more fragmentation as they build and deploy software in different regions around the world. The challenge is making sure to the fullest extent possible that any unique extensions to cloud frameworks that might make it more difficult to deploy applications is kept to an absolute minimum.
