True Digital Sovereignty: Reclaim Cloud Freedom with Polycrate

The promise of the cloud has always been flexibility. Yet, the reality in many IT departments is different: Vendor Lock-in. Those who build their entire automation exclusively on AWS APIs, Azure-specific scripts, or Google Cloud tools find themselves in a “golden trap.” Switching providers or even distributing workloads to a European provider like STACKIT or Hetzner becomes an unaffordable mammoth task.

True digital sovereignty means retaining control over your own infrastructure logic. Polycrate is the tool that fulfills this promise.

The Problem: Logic Embedded in Provider Tools

When your infrastructure definitions are inextricably tied to a provider’s proprietary services, you lose your bargaining power and agility. Every time you use “Cloud-native” services from a hyperscaler that aren’t available elsewhere, you raise the walls around your tech stack a little higher.

The challenge is to abstract applications and their operations so that they remain portable without sacrificing the convenience of modern automation.

The Solution: Abstraction through Polycrate Blocks

Polycrate addresses this issue through consistent decoupling. Instead of programming your infrastructure directly against a cloud API, you define functional units—known as Blocks.

How Polycrate Breaks the Lock-in:

1. Technology-neutral Interfaces: A Block defines what it does (e.g., “provision database”), not necessarily how the cloud provider does it in detail.
2. Platform-independent Actions: The commands for your team remain the same. Whether the install command in the background starts a VM at Hetzner or an instance at AWS is determined by the Block’s configuration, not the developer’s workflow.
3. Sovereign Stack: With Polycrate, you build your own “service catalog.” You own the logic of how your monitoring, security policies, and networks are configured. This logic moves with you—wherever you go.

Multi-Cloud as Reality, Not Just a Buzzword

For medium-sized businesses, Multi-Cloud is often not an end in itself but a necessity—whether for data protection reasons (GDPR), risk minimization, or to meet governmental requirements.

With Polycrate, switching or expanding your infrastructure becomes a standard process:

• Development on Cost-effective Hardware: Use cost-efficient providers for dev and test environments.
• Production with High-End Providers: Run your critical workloads where you need the highest availability.
• Sovereign Cloud for Sensitive Data: Move critical workloads to European providers without having to rewrite your entire automation.

Sovereignty through Standardization

We believe that software infrastructure should be an open commodity. Therefore, Polycrate uses proven open-source tools but bundles them in a way that makes them manageable for businesses. You keep the keys to your digital house in your hands.

Conclusion: Freedom is a Choice of Architecture

Digital sovereignty doesn’t fall from the sky—you have to build it. Polycrate provides you with the tools to create an infrastructure that serves your company, not your cloud provider’s quarterly report. Stay flexible, stay independent, stay sovereign.

Technical FAQ: Sovereignty with Polycrate

Does abstraction always mean a loss of functionality? It’s a trade-off. Polycrate allows you to dive as deep into provider features as you want. The key advantage is: when you choose a specific feature, you do so explicitly in a Block. This makes the dependency visible and manageable, rather than spreading it throughout your code.

Can Polycrate also manage on-premise environments? Yes, absolutely. Polycrate doesn’t care whether the action is against a cloud API or a vSphere cluster in your own basement. This makes it the ideal tool for hybrid cloud scenarios.

How complex is it to migrate a Block from Provider A to Provider B? Since the business logic and application configuration are encapsulated in the Block, usually only the underlying infrastructure resources (e.g., the Terraform module for the VM instance) need to be swapped out. The rest of the stack (Kubernetes configuration, monitoring, security rules) remains untouched.