Garanti del Talento

dgt_plat10 – Digital Sovereignty

Module Title: dgt_plat10 – Digital Sovereignty

Description:

Digital sovereignty is the ability of an organization, or a country, to keep control over its data, its infrastructure and the software it depends on. For European companies and public administrations it has become a design requirement for platforms, not just a political topic. This module explains what sovereignty means in practice for a platform team and why open source infrastructure such as OpenStack and Kubernetes is at the center of the European answer.

Module Objectives:

  1. The Three Layers of Sovereignty: Distinguish data sovereignty (where data lives and who can access it), operational sovereignty (who runs and can switch off the service) and technological sovereignty (who controls the code).

  2. The Regulatory Context: Get an overview of GDPR and the Schrems II ruling, the US CLOUD Act, NIS2, the EU Data Act and its cloud-switching rules, and the European cloud certification work.

  3. The Italian Context: Understand the national cloud strategy, the Polo Strategico Nazionale (PSN) and the cloud qualification process of the Agenzia per la Cybersicurezza Nazionale (ACN).

  4. Lock-in as a Risk: Evaluate proprietary managed services, closed APIs and egress costs as sovereignty and business-continuity risks.

  5. Open Source as a Strategy: See how open standards and open source stacks make it possible to change provider, or run the platform in-house, without rewriting applications.

Module Content:

  • Sovereign cloud models: Hyperscaler "sovereign" offerings, European providers, private cloud and hybrid models compared.

  • European initiatives: Gaia-X, the Sovereign Cloud Stack (an open source reference stack based on OpenStack and Kubernetes) and the European cloud federation projects.

  • Exit strategy: Designing for portability: data formats, infrastructure as code, Kubernetes as a common runtime, documented exit plans.

  • Sovereignty and security: Encryption with keys held by the customer, auditability, supply-chain security and transparency of the code.

  • Trade-offs: Cost, skills and operational effort of running your own cloud versus buying managed services.

Hands-on lab in natural language:

Students give the AI agent the architecture of a sample application running on a public cloud and ask it to produce a sovereignty assessment: where the data is, which services create lock-in and what an exit plan would look like. Students review the analysis, challenge its assumptions and turn it into a migration proposal towards the OpenStack-based platform built in the next lessons.

Target Audience:

This module is for students who have completed the Linux, DevOps and Containers modules, and for system administrators, DevOps engineers and SREs who want to move towards Platform Engineering. Experience with Kubernetes is recommended.

The students can push their exercises to the Academy DevOps & SRE Git project. For this module, create a folder with your username as its name in the following subfolder: https://github.com/Garanti-Del-Talento/gdt_academy