Swiss Cloud Native Day 2025 – A New Peak of Innovation & Community on Mount Gurten
19. Sep 2025
September 18, 2025 – Bern, Switzerland
The clouds cleared, the funicular was full, and the Swiss cloud-native community came together once again – this time high up on beautiful Mount Gurten in Bern. Swiss Cloud Native Day 2025 was one of those special days where you could truly feel the energy: curiosity, knowledge sharing, and the momentum of a community building something big together. From newcomers to long-time experts, from platform engineers to toolmakers – innovation and collaboration were everywhere.
What made this year special
Location & setting. Mount Gurten offered an inspiring backdrop: beautiful, accessible, and high enough for big ideas. A perfect place for the cloud-native community to summit together.
Community focus. Organized by “bernerit.rocks”, the event showed once again that Swiss practitioners are not just consumers of cloud technology, but active shapers of how cloud-native culture, practice, and governance evolve locally – with a global outlook.
Great speakers. The program was packed with talks from PostFinance, SAP, Canonical, Exoscale, CERN and many more. Highlights included:
Julia Baum and Mohit Dalal on SAP’s internal developer platform
Benjamin Schimke from Canonical
Paul Farver from the LEGO Group, blending humor and deep insights with his role as “YAML Engineer & Minifigure Poser”
Our VSHNeer Liene Luksika with a powerful story about Crossplane
5 Year Swiss Cloud Native Day Special VIP Badge for attendees who attended all 5 years:
VSHNeer Spotlight – Liene Luksika on Crossplane
One of the day’s highlights was the talk by our colleague Liene Luksika: “How we used Crossplane for the things we should not have”.
Frameworks are meant to be tweaked – that is part of an engineer’s daily life. Even if a new cloud-native open source framework promises exactly what you are trying to build yourself.
Liene told the story of what Crossplane is and what we hoped it would be. She highlighted why the emerging Crossplane V2 is necessary and how it differs. Most striking was the real-life experience: when bending turned into breaking – and during a maintenance window we lost 230 production databases for a customer. The silver lining – we kept the customer, but fundamentally changed our approach. An honest, educational and inspiring session that gave the audience plenty of food for thought.
The LEGO touch
LEGO once again brought its magic to the event. A true highlight was Paul Farver’s talk “The Bricks That Make Us – How the LEGO Group Avoids 50 Mediocre Kubernetes Implementations”. With humor and seriousness alike, he showed how large organizations can avoid technical sprawl, ensure consistency, share best practices – and prevent reinventing too many wheels (or bricks).
The VSHN LEGO competition once again lit up the room. This year’s winner Clément was celebrated with applause and lots of photos – a perfect symbol of the event: building together, brick by brick. Congratulations Clément!
Servala – Sovereign App Store
Another central theme at this year’s Swiss Cloud Native Day was Servala, the new Sovereign App Store by VSHN.
Why Servala stood out:
For software vendors, Servala offers an easy way to provide their products as managed services, distribute them through the marketplace, and reach enterprises without having to build their own operational infrastructure.
For enterprises and private clouds, Servala means standardized, managed services that meet compliance, security, and audit requirements – while still offering flexibility. A major step toward digital sovereignty.
For cloud providers, Servala is a true differentiator: infrastructure alone is no longer enough. The real value lies in services. A sovereign catalog of vetted managed applications is becoming increasingly important.
Conversations around Servala were lively: How do SLAs work, how is trust between providers and users established, what does data locality and regulation mean in Switzerland and Europe? The audience was clearly ready to dive deep into these questions.
What people talked about after the event
How to avoid reinventing the same Kubernetes architecture in different parts of an organization
What “sovereignty” really means in cloud-native contexts: data location, governance, open source, auditability, avoiding vendor lock-in
The role curated marketplaces like Servala play in helping teams move faster – but also safer
Interoperability and standardization – across cloud providers and within deployment pipelines
Conclusion
Swiss Cloud Native Day 2025 may have only lasted one day, but it truly packed a punch. Once again it showed that in the cloud-native ecosystem, technology alone is not enough – culture, community, trust, and sovereignty are just as important.
From Mount Gurten, the view was not just over Bern – it was also over a future where Swiss and European cloud-native solutions do not simply follow the big players, but carve their own path – shaped by openness, control, compliance, and innovation.
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
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Redis 8 Now Available in the VSHN Application Catalog – Open Source Is Back!
11. Jun 2025
We’re thrilled to announce that Redis 8 is now available through the VSHN Application Catalog – and this release is a special one: Redis is officially open source again!
But that’s not all: Redis is now also available on Servala – the open, cloud-native service hub operated by VSHN, connecting developers, software vendors, and cloud providers across multiple infrastructures.
Why This Is a Big Deal
For years, Redis has been one of the most popular in-memory databases for developers and DevOps teams alike. However, licensing changes in previous versions created friction for open ecosystems and cloud-native users. With version 8, that’s finally changing: Redis has returned to its open source roots, now licensed under the GNU AGPLv3.
“Redis 8 brings Redis back to its open source roots. All future development of Redis will happen under the AGPLv3 license.” – Redis team, official announcement
This means greater transparency, broader collaboration, and long-term sustainability for users who rely on Redis as a key part of their stack.
Redis 8 with VSHN and Servala: Fully Managed, Highly Available
With Redis 8 now available in both the VSHN Application Catalog and on Servala, you get more than just the latest open source release:
Production-grade deployments on Kubernetes and OpenShift
Guaranteed availability, monitoring, and automated failover
Lifecycle management, including upgrades and security patches
Cloud provider flexibility – deploy in your infrastructure or through partners
Self-service provisioning via Servala with built-in automation
Whether you’re running Redis as part of your internal platform, or offering it to teams and customers, we’ve got you covered.
Supported Versions
We continue to support the most widely used Redis versions, with Redis 8 now part of our officially maintained portfolio. Check out the complete list of supported versions on the VSHN Redis product page and the Servala Redis page.
Why Choose Redis 8 via VSHN or Servala?
✅ Fully open source and community-driven again
✅ Kubernetes-native, GitOps-ready deployments
✅ High availability, failover, and backup strategies included
✅ Integrated with your infrastructure, or offered as a managed service
✅ Supported by VSHN, the DevOps experts behind Servala
Redis 8 is a major milestone for the open source world – and we’re proud to bring it to your production environment through VSHN and Servala.
The Technical Challenges Behind Servala: Standardizing Application Delivery
14. Apr 2025
In this follow-up to our Servala introduction, we explore the technical challenges of bringing managed services to cloud providers everywhere. Discover how the repetitive and inconsistent nature of application packaging, deployment, and operations inspired our vision for standardization.
We explore the problems platform engineers face today, including inconsistent container behaviors, unpredictable Helm charts, and the chaos of day-2 operations across security, configuration, and dependencies.
Learn how Servala’s proposed open standards will transform the landscape for:
Software vendors – Accelerating time-to-market and expanding reach without operational overhead
Cloud providers – Enriching service catalogs with enterprise-grade managed services
End users – Enjoying self-service freedom with consistent, secure, and compliant applications
Join us on this journey to simplify application delivery and make managed services accessible to everyone.
In our introduction to Servala, we mentioned the technical challenges of enabling software vendors to onboard themselves onto our platform. As we continue building Servala in 2025, we’re tackling the most fundamental challenge: creating a standardized approach to application delivery. Let’s explore these challenges and our proposed solution in more detail.
The Repetitive Nature of Application Management
Over the past years at VSHN, we have taken care of numerous applications as part of our managed services offering that now forms the foundation of Servala. For every single application, we had to do the same tedious tasks:
Packaging: Prepare the application in a deployable format, typically by creating an OCI-compliant container image compatible with Docker, Podman, Kubernetes, and OpenShift. Automate the packaging process to trigger whenever a new version is available.
Deployment: Deploy the packaged application to the target system, typically through automated processes rather than manual steps. Most deployments span multiple environments, such as test, staging, pre-prod, and production, or support self-service provisioning for SaaS. This process often involves creating Helm Charts and setting up automation pipelines or APIs provided by tools like Kubernetes operators (e.g., Crossplane).
Day-2 Operations: After deployment, ongoing responsibilities include collecting metrics, setting up alerts, updating the application, scaling in response to performance issues, backing up and restoring data, analyzing logs, offering 24/7 support, and ensuring compliance with various standards, along with many other operational tasks.
The Current Challenge for Servala
Doing these same steps over and over again becomes tedious. Solving the same problems whenever we must take care of a new application doesn’t feel valuable. In reality, we have to deal with a multitude of different ways in which these things are done. It puts a lot of burden on engineers, having to cope with all the many ways all these tasks can be done. Usually, parts of the functions mentioned above are already done. As an example, container images are already available, but every image behaves differently from the other. And that means we must always figure out how to integrate into the next step. The same applies to the various Helm Charts out there. Standardization will relieve us from this burden, making the process more efficient and less repetitive.
The core issue stems from the flexibility of the tools involved. Container images vary widely in how they’re built and behave, while Helm Charts accept parameters in inconsistent formats. For example, the container image reference might appear as img, image, or image-registry, depending on the chart author.
Security scanning and compliance reporting vary widely between applications. Some include Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), while others require manual inventory. Configuration handling is equally inconsistent—some applications use environment variables, others expect config files in specific locations, and others require custom configuration APIs.
Day-2 operations vary significantly across applications. Some expose metrics in a Prometheus-compatible format, while others don’t. Identical metrics might use different names, and logging formats range from structured JSON to custom plain text. Dependency management is often neglected, with minimal information about required services or components. As a result, maintaining these applications turns into a tedious game of whack-a-mole.
We must solve these fundamental inconsistencies so that Servala can scale and enable software vendors to onboard their applications easily.
Our Proposed Solution: Standardization
How could we solve these obstacles? We propose to define a set of documents that specify patterns for all the various parts needed to deliver applications through Servala. We could also call these documents specifications, golden paths, patterns, standards, conventions, or defaults. Ultimately, the goal is to document a commonly agreed-upon way to solve the mentioned tasks so that we don’t have to iterate over them repeatedly.
However, doing that just for us feels wrong. As a company, we embrace Open-Source and Open Standards to work together in a defined way. Therefore, we propose to form a group of people from various companies, document the patterns together, and agree on them.
The Vision: A Transformed Application Delivery Landscape
What will application delivery look like once the Servala specifications are widely adopted? The benefits will be transformative for all parties involved:
For Software Vendors:
Accelerated Time to Market: Instead of spending months building deployment, monitoring, and maintenance systems, vendors can focus on their core product and leverage Servala’s standardized delivery mechanisms to reach cloud providers globally.
Reduced Operational Overhead: By conforming to the Servala specification, vendors automatically inherit proven operational practices like monitoring, metrics, logs, backups, etc, without maintaining their own operations team.
Expanded Market Reach: The ability to deploy on any Servala-compatible cloud provider opens new markets without additional engineering effort.
Enhanced Security Posture: Standardized security scanning, compliance reporting, and configuration management significantly reduce risk, enabling vendors to confidently deploy their applications on Servala-compatible cloud providers, even without dedicated in-house security expertise.
For Cloud Providers:
Enriched Service Catalogs: Providers can instantly offer dozens of managed services that follow consistent operational patterns, dramatically increasing their value proposition.
Operational Consistency: All services follow the same patterns for monitoring, alerting, and maintenance, reducing the complexity of running multiple third-party applications.
Competitive Differentiation: Smaller cloud providers can now compete with hyperscalers by offering comparable catalogs of managed services.
For End Users:
With Servala’s standardized delivery Mechanisms, end users can deploy complex managed services confidently, knowing they follow consistent operational patterns. This empowerment gives them a sense of control and confidence in their operations.
The operational interfaces remain consistent regardless of application deployment, providing end users a predictable and secure experience. This predictability reassures them of the system’s stability and reliability.
Enterprise Readiness: All services automatically include security, backup/restore, monitoring, and other enterprise features without custom integration work.
Simplified Compliance: Standardized security scanning and compliance reporting make regulatory audits more straightforward and less resource-intensive.
Dependency Clarity: Clear visibility into service dependencies and compatibility requirements reduces deployment failures and configuration errors.
The Servala Specification Areas
We envision documenting patterns for:
Container image behavior, such as where to store data, how to expose ports, how the entry point behaves, and with which permissions the application runs.
Helm Chart “API”: How do the standard values behave? What does the configuration structure look like?
Unified Operational Framework:
Backup and Restore: Standardized interfaces for consistent application and data backup procedures with well-defined restoration paths and verification methods
Metrics: Well-defined endpoints to get application metrics for alerting, monitoring, and performance insights
Alerting and Monitoring: Common alert definitions, severity classifications, and response expectations across applications
Logging Standards: Uniform logging formats, retention policies, and search capabilities to simplify troubleshooting
SLA Definitions: Standardized metrics for measuring and reporting on availability, performance, and reliability
Maintenance Windows: Clear protocols for coordinating and communicating maintenance events with minimal disruption
Billing: A Uniform way of billing service usage
Security Scanning and Compliance: Standardized approaches for vulnerability management, security policy enforcement, and compliance reporting across all applications
Configuration Management: Unified patterns for handling application configuration, secrets management, and runtime reconfiguration
Dependency Management: Clear declaration and handling of service dependencies, including versioning requirements and compatibility matrices
Self-Service API Architecture: Propose standardized structures for Kubernetes resources, creating predictable interfaces for application management across environments.
Previous work we want to build on
There have been successful efforts to standardize that we want to build on:
Open Container Image (OCI) Image Format
After a decade of fragmentation in how containers were built and stored, the OCI initiative introduced a unified image format adopted by tools like Docker and Podman. It standardized filesystem locations (e.g., /var/lib/docker/), defined predictable image layering, and enabled interoperability across registries such as Docker Hub, GitHub Container Registry (GHCR), and Quay.
Kubernetes as a container orchestrator
Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard for managing container fleets. It provides a unified API for managing compute, networking, and storage regardless of the infrastructure provider.
Kubernetes Pod and Container Lifecycle Conventions
The Kubernetes community has standardized application behavior during lifecycle events, such as startup, shutdown, and health checks, ensuring consistent health monitoring. Applications now respond predictably to restarts and draining, greatly easing the work of platform engineers. Implementing lifecycle hooks has become a de facto standard.
Prometheus Metrics Format
Many applications already implement exposing metrics in the Prometheus OpenMetrics format, and where, by convention, the “/metrics” endpoint exposes a human-readable or OpenMetrics-compliant format, there are some Standard naming conventions (http_requests_total, etc.). While it’s not perfect yet, as some metric names still vary, this is one of the most widely accepted informal standards adopted by applications, exporters, sidecars, service monitors, etc.
Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) standards
With open SBOM standards now established and widely supported by vendors like GitHub, GitLab, and Docker, generating and consuming SBOMs has become a best practice. It’s so fundamental that the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) now mandates SBOMs for all proprietary and open-source software.
12-Factor App
While some inconsistencies remain, we still want to honorably mention the https://12factor.net/ manifesto, which laid the Foundation for cloud-native apps in 2011 and still influences architecture and platform design today. Solving Inconsistent application structure and runtime expectations, these are now widely adopted best practices: config via env vars, statelessness, logging to stdout, etc., often enforced indirectly by platforms.
Helm Chart Best Practices / Guidelines
The Helm community recognizes the inconsistency in chart structures and naming and has responded with best practices, guidelines, and tools like helm lint and helm create. While adoption remains partial, projects like Bitnami, KubeApps, and Backstage increasingly rely on these conventions, laying a strong foundation for what Servala aims to standardize.
OpenAPI / Swagger
The OpenAPI Initiative has significantly impacted API standardization. It enables machine-readable API definitions, automatic generation of SDKs, tests, mocks, and human-friendly documentation. Widely adopted across platforms – from Kubernetes CRDs to GitHub APIs – OpenAPI has brought consistency and interoperability to API design and consumption.
OpenServiceBroker API
We’ve implemented the OpenServiceBroker API and are using it actively with a few clients, but it’s missing the declarative and cloud-native approach to service listing and provisioning.
Crossplane
We’re fans of Crossplane’s declarative approach to service definitions and instantiations. Crossplanes Composite Resource Definitions (XRDs) provide opinionated Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), which all have the same structure as what the engineer defined in the XRD. Servala is not replacing Crossplane but uses Crossplane under the hood.
Open Application Model (OAM)
The Open Application Model (OAM) supports Servala’s mission by offering a platform-agnostic, standardized way to define cloud-native applications. It cleanly separates core logic (components), operational features (traits), and dependencies (scopes), providing a consistent interface for developers and operators. With reusable metrics, backups, and autoscaling definitions, OAM helps eliminate the fragmentation found in Helm charts and container images, making it an interesting foundation for Servala’s specification and enabling consistent managed services across environments.
The Platform Specification
The Platform Spec initiative contributes to Servala’s vision by offering a standardized contract between developers and platform engineers, defining a standard interface for deploying and managing applications across any internal developer platform (IDP). It focuses on creating a consistent, YAML-based specification for app workloads, including container images, environment variables, secrets, service bindings, and deployment rules. It solves many issues Servala identifies with inconsistent Helm charts and runtime behaviors. By adopting or aligning with Platform Spec, Servala can simplify onboarding, reduce integration overhead, and ensure applications are deployed in a predictable, platform-agnostic way, regardless of the underlying orchestrator or infrastructure.
Cloud Native Application Bundle (CNAB)
The Cloud Native Application Bundle (CNAB) specification supports Servala’s goals by providing a portable, standardized way to package and distribute multi-component applications, including Kubernetes manifests or Helm charts and Terraform plans, scripts, and other deployment artifacts. CNAB defines a consistent format for bundling an application’s code, configuration, and lifecycle operations (install, upgrade, uninstall), making it ideal for complex managed services that span multiple tools or environments. By leveraging CNAB, Servala could offer a unified packaging format that encapsulates everything needed for reliable, repeatable deployment, helping reduce fragmentation, simplify onboarding, and enable consistent Day-2 operations across cloud providers.
The Path Forward
Servala aims to accelerate application onboarding by a factor of 10, reducing weeks of custom integration to just days or hours, while dramatically improving reliability through consistent, proven patterns for deployment and operations. We’ve already begun implementing these standards in our development roadmap, but broad industry collaboration is essential for success. We invite software vendors, cloud providers, and platform engineers to join us in shaping these standards openly and collaboratively. With a solid foundation, Servala can redefine how managed services are delivered, empowering cloud providers to expand their service catalogs and enabling vendors to become SaaS providers without heavy operational overhead.
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What’s Next?
In 2025, we will focus on enabling software vendors to onboard themselves onto the Servala service delivery platform. Find more information about Why we launched Servala in our Servala launch announcement.
Contact us
Interested in learning more? Book a meeting or write us to explore how Servala can help you! Experience the future of cloud native services on servala.com. 🚀
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
Latest news
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VSHN @ Smart Country Convention 2025 – Recap from Berlin
Our vision at VSHN is to help the software industry focus on its core business by supporting developers with platform engineering. After more than a decade in this field, we’ve worked with a vast range of infrastructures and identified a key challenge: while cloud providers and enterprise private clouds excel at delivering compute, storage, and network resources, they often lack the managed services essential for modern software, such as databases, caches, queues, etc.
To bridge this gap, we provide our managed services, ensuring developers can focus on building great software rather than worrying about infrastructure complexities.
The Insight: We’re Not Alone
Over the years, we realized we weren’t the only ones struggling with this issue. Many users of these infrastructures – whether internal IT teams or third-party agencies – also had to bring their own managed services, creating unnecessary duplication of effort. This wastes time and resources and distracts software companies from delivering value to their users.
Between 2018 and 2020, this became increasingly clear: What if cloud providers could natively offer these managed services instead of forcing customers to build their own solutions? Hyperscalers like AWS and Azure already provide these capabilities, but small and mid-sized cloud providers typically lack the resources to offer a complete managed services catalog.
The Opportunity: Empower Cloud Providers
In 2020, we took a significant step forward by developing a way to instantiate a managed service directly within a Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster for one of our customers. This has been in production since early 2021. This allowed developers to access fully managed and compliant services, like databases, without needing to file a ticket request. We expanded our catalog over the next two years, creating a robust self-service solution developers love.
By early 2023, we asked ourselves: Why not directly bring this catalog of valuable managed services to cloud providers, enhancing their infrastructure offerings? That question led to Servala – The Open Cloud Native Service Hub, formerly the “VSHN Application Marketplace”.
With Servala, our goal is to equip cloud providers with the managed services they need to compete with hyperscalers while allowing them to maintain their focus on delivering high-quality infrastructure services.
For Cloud Providers: If you’re offering compute and storage,let’s talk!
Introducing Servala
As we developed Servala throughout 2024 and into 2025, we discovered another critical need: many software vendors want to offer their software as a SaaS but struggle with the operational challenges. Transitioning to a SaaS model requires handling:
Preparing the software for SaaS deployment and packaging it for self-service availability
Managing day-2 operations like security, compliance, monitoring, alerting, scaling, maintenance, backup, and 24/7 support
Since running software is at the heart of what we do, we decided to extend Servala to help software vendors seamlessly transition into SaaS providers. By onboarding applications into Servala, software vendors gain instant access to cloud providers and private enterprise clouds, opening up new sales channels without the operational burden.
For Software Vendors: Want to turn your software into a SaaS offering? We can help!
Learn more in our “Intro to Servala” Webinar Recording
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What’s Next?
In 2025, we will focus on enabling software vendors to onboard themselves onto the Servala service delivery platform. This presents exciting technical challenges, which we’ll explore in this article.
Interested in learning more? Book a meeting or write us to explore how Servala can help you! Experience the future of cloud native services on servala.com. 🚀
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
Latest news
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VSHN @ Smart Country Convention 2025 – Recap from Berlin
Webinar Intro to Servala – Open Cloud Native Service Hub
25. Mar 2025
Unlock the Power of Cloud Native Services with Servala
Are you ready to simplify cloud native service delivery and enhance agility while optimizing costs? Join us for an exclusive introduction to Servala – Open Cloud Native Service Hub.
Learn more in our “Intro to Servala” Webinar Recording
Servala Intro Webinar: Unlock the Power of Cloud Native Services
📅 Date: Thursday, March 27, 2025 🕒 Time: 13:00 – 13:45 CET 📍 Location: Online
Why You Should Attend
The shift to cloud native architectures is transforming how software is developed, deployed, and managed. However, businesses, software vendors, and cloud providers often face challenges such as complexity, security concerns, and cost inefficiencies.
Servala is designed to solve these challenges by offering a unified, secure, and scalable platform for cloud native service delivery. Whether you’re a Software Vendor, Cloud Provider, or part of an Enterprise IT Team, Servala provides game-changing advantages.
What You’ll Learn
During this webinar, we’ll explore:
The common challenges in cloud native service delivery
How Servala simplifies deployment and management of cloud native applications
The vision behind Servala and how it enables secure and seamless access to services
Key benefits, including faster time-to-market, cost optimization, and compliance
A live demo showcasing how easy it is to deploy a cloud native service with Servala
Agenda
Welcome & Introduction (5 min)
Overview of cloud native challenges and how Servala addresses them
What is Servala? (15 min)
The vision behind Servala
Key features and capabilities
Open Standard for cloud native SaaS applications: Join our consortium to help shape the future of cloud interoperability
Who Benefits from Servala? (10 min)
Software Vendors: Transform software into managed services and expand market reach
Cloud Providers: Offer value-added services and enhance operational efficiency
Enterprise IT Teams: Enable secure, self-service access while maintaining compliance
Key Benefits & Value Proposition (10 min)
Faster Time-to-Market: Deploy services instantly
Cloud-Agnostic: Works on any cloud or on-prem
Security & Compliance: GDPR, ISO, and ISAE-ready
Cost Optimization: Transparent pricing and lower expenses
Fully Managed: VSHN handles maintenance & updates
Live Demo (20 min)
Walkthrough of Servala’s interface and catalog
Deploying a cloud native service in minutes
Q&A & Next Steps (15 min)
Open discussion and questions
How to get started with Servala
Key Takeaways
Learn how Servala simplifies cloud native service delivery for businesses, developers, and cloud providers
Discover why Servala is the best choice for secure, scalable, and cost-efficient cloud native services
Watch a live demo of how to deploy and manage services with Servala
Register Today for the Webinar!
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to gain insights and see Servala in action. Sign up now and take the first step towards unlocking the power of cloud native services!
VSHN launches Servala – Open Cloud Native Service Hub
12. Mar 2025
Zürich, March 12, 2025 – VSHN, Switzerland’s leading DevOps company, proudly announces the public launch of Servala, an open and sovereign platform connecting businesses, developers, and cloud providers on one unified hub. Servala offers secure, scalable, and easy-to-use cloud native applications and services, empowering organizations with unparalleled flexibility and control.
Servala – A Unified Cloud Native Ecosystem
Servala enables seamless access to a vast array of software, databases, applications, and DevOps tools across multiple cloud providers and regions. Organizations gain the freedom to run applications and services anywhere, accelerating innovation while optimizing costs, security, and compliance.
For Software Vendors, Servala simplifies the transformation of traditional software into fully managed SaaS offerings, expanding market reach while streamlining operations and monetization. Cloud Providers can leverage Servala to offer value-added services to customers, enhancing efficiency and staying competitive in the rapidly evolving industry. Enterprise Private Clouds benefit from secure and scalable services, allowing them to deploy trusted applications effortlessly while maintaining full control over security and compliance.
What sets Servala apart is its openness and its ability to accelerate time-to-market. As a fully sovereign and agnostic platform, Servala ensures that applications and services can run on any cloud or on-premises infrastructure. With built-in compliance for GDPR, ISO, and ISAE standards, Servala guarantees enterprise-grade security. Flexible Cloud Provider zones empower businesses with data sovereignty, while transparent pricing and Kubernetes native integration simplify deployment and scaling.
Defining the Future of Cloud Native SaaS Applications
We are launching an initiative to establish an open standard for cloud native SaaS applications. Rather than presenting a finished solution, we invite collaboration to define clear guidelines for packaging, deploying, and operating cloud applications and services.
Our Vision for the Standard
Application Packaging Framework: We envision OCI-compatible containers with strictly defined runtime behaviors, complemented by Helm Charts featuring standardized parameter structures. These would adhere to 12-Factor methodology to ensure consistency and scalability.
Unified Operational Framework:
Backup & Restore: Standardized interfaces for consistent application and data backup procedures with well-defined restoration paths and verification methods
Metrics: Well-defined endpoints to get application metrics for alerting, monitoring and performance insights
Alerting & Monitoring: Common alert definitions, severity classifications, and response expectations across applications
Logging Standards: Uniform logging formats, retention policies, and search capabilities to simplify troubleshooting
SLA Definitions: Standardized metrics for measuring and reporting on availability, performance, and reliability
Maintenance Windows: Clear protocols for coordinating and communicating maintenance events with minimal disruption
Billing: Uniform way of billing service usage
Self-Service API Architecture: We propose standardized structures for Kubernetes resources and Crossplane Composite Resource Definitions, creating predictable interfaces for application management across environments.
An Open Consortium Approach
This is just the beginning. We are establishing a consortium where Cloud Providers, SaaS companies, and Enterprise users can collectively shape these specifications. We believe that real value comes from working together in the open. By combining diverse perspectives and real-world requirements, we can create a standard that truly serves the broader ecosystem rather than any single vendor’s interest.
👉Interested in shaping the future of cloud native applications? Join our consortium and contribute to building specifications that enhance predictability, interoperability, and maintainability in cloud deployments.
Grow with Servala
Designed for scalability and DevOps readiness, Servala grows with businesses, ensuring that services remain reliable and high-performing as demand increases. With VSHN managing maintenance, updates, and monitoring, organizations can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management. Whether choosing open-source solutions or commercial editions, users benefit from a rich ecosystem of services and applications, backed by an expert network of consulting partners for optimization and support.
At launch, Servala offers a diverse range of services, including:
PostgreSQL – A powerful open-source object-relational database system
Forgejo – A self-hosted lightweight software forge for code hosting
Red Hat OpenShift – A comprehensive platform for developing and deploying applications at scale
Keycloak – An open-source identity and access management solution
These services are available across multiple cloud providers integrated with Servala, including:
Cloudscale – Designed for ease of use
Exoscale – Catering to the needs of modern cloud applications
APPUiO – The leading Kubernetes-based container hosting platform for expert software engineers
Subscribe to Updates
Always be the first to find out all the latest news about Servala. Simply add your email below:
Watch the Recording of our Webinar “Intro to Servala”
Learn more about Servala – Open Cloud Native Service Hub in the webinar where we will explain in detail how Servala connects businesses, developers, and cloud providers and how you can profit from it.
Contact us
With its public launch, Servala is now available for businesses of all sizes. To experience the future of cloud native services, sign up today at servala.com or contact us at hi@servala.com. 🚀
Markus Speth
Marketing, Communications, People
Latest news
Events
General
VSHN @ Smart Country Convention 2025 – Recap from Berlin
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