SCS trainings worldwide: Open training approach for digital sovereignty
The discussion of digital sovereignty has long outgrown the boundaries of Europe. Organizations, companies and governments worldwide are looking for ways to keep control over their own digital infrastructure and their data - independent, secure and built upon open standards. This is where Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) comes into play.
SCS is not just the response to the demand for operating digitally sovereign infrastructure - it also comes with and educational side. Because true sovereignty can only emerge when human develop a deep understanding of the used technology - and gain competency to operate it.
Collaboration with GovStack: Combining standards, knowledge and practice
A comprehensive training program that fosters digital sovereignty by practice in operating clouds was developed together with the the international initiative GovStack. GovStack globally supports the setup of digital services by defining standardised building blocks, test and demo environments as well as a market place for interoperable open solutions.
The Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) project actively contributes to GovStack: SCS provided significant input for the development of GovStack's Cloud Infrastructure Building Block. The SCS reference implementation is also listed as a conforming solution on the govstack market - an important milestone in the quest to provide more trust and international adoption of sovereign cloud technology.
An important part of the collaboration is a training program, which teaches both technical foundations and practical experience. It encompasses:
- Self-study via online material,
- a one-week course on the foundations,
- several weeks of practical work with test environments (e.g. "Cloud-in-a-Box"),
- and an advanced training course with focus on real-world operations.
The goal of this program is to enable engaged participants to operate a complete SCS cloud environment (including virtualization and container layer as well as the tooling) on their own -- with occasional support by external partners.
SCS in Africa: Successful training in Kenya
An outstanding example for the implementation of this training program is the first advanced course that took place in Nairobi, Kenya, in May of 2025. Over 20 participants from Kenya, Somalia, and Djibouti gathered for an intense week of trainings. Most of them had participated in the foundational courses before which Karsten Samaschke had lead in a number of African countries.
The trainings was organized and paid for by the ITU (International Telecommunications Union, Geneva) and GIZ (German Society for International Cooperation, Bonn/Eschborn). There was live translation into French for the French-speaking participants, so everyone was able to actively participate without language barriers.
The training week in Nairobi was characterized by intense interactions from highly motivated participants. Some challenges existed - last not least the common lack of available infrastructure in the participants' home countries to prepare for the course. Despite this, there was concentrated and active participation where the participants were able to build a solid foundation of knowledge and experience. With some further practice and possibly some more trainings, they will be able to become self-reliant in setting up and reliably operating an SCS Cloud.
Learning by Doing: Cloud-in-a-Box as local training environment
The training had a clear structure: Explain, test, apply. In numerous small modules, topics were introduced and explained. The participants then got the opportunity to apply the learnings directly afterwards with practical assignments - with some supervision by the trainers but largely on their own.
All demonstrations and practice was done locally with a specially prepared Cloud-in-a-Box (CiaB). This small yet powerful training environment did not only make for a tangible setup but also ensure independence from a stable internet connection to Europe. The participants thus were enabled to work under realistic conditions - just like later on for operating real SCS clouds.
The used CiaB was actually a powerful mini computer with 8 Zen4 cores (16 threads), 96GB of RAM, and 2x4TB NVMe storage. All relevant services were running there: Ceph for block and object storage, OpenStack for the Virtualization and several Kubernetes clusters managed by SCS Cluster Stacks.
Direct access to the infrastructure was provided via a locally operated WLAN and via Wireguard tunnels from the participants' laptops - no matter whether Windows, macOS or Linux was deployed on these. So they could seamlessly switch between learning and accessing the environment with building practical experience as cloud users and operators.
SCS training material: open, flexible and jointly extensible
Training material has been created for this course - modular, practical and openly available.
The structure of it follows the didactic concept: After each knowledge block there are practical assignments that should be worked through by the participants, on their own or with some support by the trainers as needed. During the course in Nairobi, most of the assignments were actually successfully done, though a few were cut short due to time constraints.
The material is available as a collection of markdown formatted text. It can easily be extended, transformed into presentation slides (e.g. with HedgeDoc) or transformed into a PDF booklet (~85 pages as of Aug 2025).
Especially important is that it has been made available under an an Open Source License (CC-BY-SA-4.0). This license requires attribution to the original authors (BY) and the republication of own changes under the same license (SA). The license was chosen deliberately to ensure that future extensions and improvements would be benefiting the whole community again.
The brands Sovereign Cloud Stack and SCS continue to be owned by the OSBA. Trainings with the SCS name thus should be done by members and in alignment with the Forum SCS-Standards of the OSBA. This ensures a consistent representation and the quality of the trainings. Collaboration in the forum and the conduct of trainings is explicitly encouraged. Everyone can this way contribute to further spread sovereign cloud technology worldwide.
🔗 Download & Contribute: https://github.com/SovereignCloudStack/scs-training/
Acknowledgements
Special thanks go to the ITU for financing and releasing the training materials and to GIZ for organizing and funding the training course in Kenya, which was conducted by Karsten Samaschke (VanillaCore) together with myself (Kurt Garloff, S7n Cloud Services GmbH). There were furthermore contributions to the training materials by dNation s.r.o., OSISM GmbH and the SCS Community.
