This blog is written by proIO team members: Najla Brand and Alexander Lapp.

Why now is the time to question how we build and operate the cloud

The “cloud conversation” has never been just about cost reduction.
It has always been about control, transparency, and independence — three principles that have long guided IT decisions.

Those principles are still achievable today, but reaching them is becoming increasingly difficult. Not because technology has failed us, but because the fundamental internet structure has changed.

What began as a decentralized and diverse ecosystem has, over the past decade, evolved into a market dominated by a few global players. A small number of providers now decide how cloud infrastructure is designed and operated with remarkable efficiency, but also with a growing sense of dependency as a side effect.

It is no longer a balance; it is an oligopoly — stable, convenient, and therefore deceptive.

That does not mean the major platforms are inherently bad.
They have turned cloud computing into one of the greatest innovation drivers of our time. But it does mean that we need to reassess their role.

The real question is no longer whether organizations use the cloud, but under what conditions.
-Which degrees of freedom are we willing to keep?
-Which risks are we ready to accept?
-And how much transparency are we prepared to demand?

In the end, one simple truth remains: whoever controls the infrastructure also controls the risk. And that is something organizations, regardless of their size, need to bring back into focus.

1. The situation: Growth meets uncertainty

Many companies already rely on cloud models, yet increasingly recognize that costs are often difficult to predict because consumption models have become more complex.
Performance and support are standardized but rarely personal or available around the clock. Technical dependencies quietly emerge through proprietary interfaces and closed ecosystems. Organizations handling sensitive or regulated data, whether in healthcare, manufacturing, or the public sector, realize that cloud is no longer an IT topic. It has become a core part of business strategy.

2. An industry in transition: The Cloud grows up

As the market matures, so do the questions we ask about the cloud.
It is no longer about what we move there, but about how stable, traceable, and controllable those systems truly are.

Centralized control, automated deployment, and global scalability were once signs of progress — and they still are. But as everything becomes more interconnected and abstract, the underlying mechanisms become harder to see.

The cloud works; that is not up for debate.
The real question is under what conditions it will remain sustainable in the long term.

This is exactly where many IT and business leaders find themselves today.
They are searching for balance between scalability and control, between global flexibility and local accountability.

Those who rely entirely on international hyperscalers inevitably operate within an infrastructure and legal framework that is not their own. Extraterritorial access rights, such as those enabled by the US CLOUD Act, symbolize a deeper issue that is not legal but structural: data and responsibility are drifting apart.

The result is a quiet but noticeable shift.

More and more organizations are reevaluating their dependencies, not out of distrust, but out of a desire for predictability, technical transparency, and long-term freedom of choice.

And that brings us back to a concept that has been somewhat forgotten in recent years: 

“The fundamental idea behind the Internet and the WWW is to create a decentralized, redundant, and open system for information sharing that is resilient to failure and promotes transparency and access.”

And Open Source is a part of its technical foundation.

3. Our approach: Open Source as the prerequisite for understanding

Anyone who takes long-term responsibility for infrastructure knows that control does not come from ownership, but from understanding. And understanding only emerges when systems are open enough to inspect, adapt, and repair. That is where much of the cloud industry has drifted toward convenience. Many infrastructures run flawlessly, yet very few people can explain how. Automation, managed services, and layered abstractions have created a kind of black-box operation — efficient, but detached.

At proIO, we wanted to do it differently. From the beginning, we knew that we could only speak credibly about stability, performance, or security if we truly understood the technology and not just consumed it.

That is why we chose a fully open architecture built on Apache CloudStack as our orchestration layer and LINBIT LINSTOR as our storage backbone.

This decision was not ideological; it was strategic. Open Source is not a philosophy, it is a quality attribute. When systems are open, clarity becomes a requirement rather than a luxury. Issues surface earlier, integration becomes cleaner, automation becomes more reliable.

CloudStack meets those criteria. It is not the loudest name in the cloud universe, but it is one of the most consistent. It provides a clear and modular architecture that reduces IaaS to its essentials, an API-first design that enables automation without sacrificing autonomy, and an active community that solves real production challenges rather than inventing new buzzwords. Together, these elements make it possible to do something rare in today’s market: run a cloud we genuinely understand, down to the last layer.

4. What Apache CloudStack enables in practice

Today, our customers use CloudStack as the central interface for all IaaS operations.
Through the API or web interface, they can deploy virtual machines, networks, or firewalls in seconds. Multi-tenancy ensures clear resource allocation and cost transparency, which is especially valuable for internal IT teams and multi-project environments. Integration with open-source storage solutions such as LINBIT LINSTOR delivers high availability and strong performance within the EU. Automation and monitoring with tools such as Ansible, Prometheus, and Grafana make the platform fully DevOps-ready.

The result is a cloud environment that combines flexibility and efficiency with full technical traceability — a system that works with its users, not above them.

5. A look ahead: What this means for Business

The combination of Apache CloudStack and private cloud infrastructures operated in our datacenters represents what we call the third way: as agile as public cloud, as secure as on-premise, and as transparent as open systems should be.

Organizations that invest early in such models are not just building IT capacity; they are building strategic resilience. In the years ahead, those who understand their infrastructure will be the ones who can adapt fastest — technically, economically, and culturally.

Further Reading

Case Study: LINBIT and proIO – Open Source Storage for a Sovereign Private Cloud
https://linbit.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/proIO_Case_Study_2025.pdf