#135 The Return of OpenStack: Kubernetes & Sovereign Infrastructure

In Episode 135 of the Dutch Kubernetes Podcast, Ronald Kers and Jan Stomphorst sit down with Mohamed Nasser, CEO of VEXXHOST and OpenInfra Foundation board member, together with Thierry Carrez, General Manager of the OpenInfra Foundation and Linux Foundation Europe. The conversation explores the growing relevance of OpenStack in a world increasingly focused on digital sovereignty, private cloud, AI workloads, and secure infrastructure.

The episode dives into how the industry shifted from private infrastructure toward hyperscalers between 2016 and 2020, and why many organizations are now reconsidering that strategy. Thierry explains how geopolitical tensions, vendor lock-in, and changing licensing models have renewed interest in sovereign cloud solutions powered by open source technologies like OpenStack.

Mohamed and Thierry discuss why OpenStack is still highly relevant at massive scale, especially for organizations requiring multi-tenancy, hardware abstraction, GPU enablement, HPC workloads, and advanced networking performance. They explain how Kubernetes has become the user-facing interface, while OpenStack increasingly operates invisibly underneath many modern platforms. Examples discussed include rail infrastructure, gaming companies, telecom providers, and even government environments.

The discussion also explores how Kubernetes and OpenStack complement each other instead of competing. Mohamed explains how many providers now run OpenStack itself on Kubernetes, leveraging cloud-native tooling such as Prometheus and Loki to simplify operations and observability. The hosts also discuss storage abstraction, CSI drivers, bare-metal provisioning with Ironic, and why virtualization still offers major operational advantages in large-scale Kubernetes environments.

Towards the end of the episode, the conversation shifts toward the future of open infrastructure, including confidential computing, Kata Containers, AI security, GPU orchestration, and the growing collaboration between the Linux Foundation, CNCF, and OpenInfra Foundation. Thierry highlights how secure container isolation and confidential computing are becoming increasingly important as AI workloads spread across Kubernetes platforms.

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