Self-hosted / open sourceVirtualisation & ContainersHeadquarters: US

Kairos: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Kairos is a Linux framework for managing the full lifecycle of machines, from installation through upgrades to recovery. It uses immutable root filesystems and OCI images distributed through registries, and it can run on several Linux distributions. Kairos supports Kubernetes distributions such as k3s and k0s, but Kubernetes is optional. Machines are provisioned from ISO or OCI images and operated on the customer's own hardware.

Kairos is a sandbox project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, released under the Apache 2.0 licence with source code on GitHub. Spectro Cloud, the company behind the project, offers commercial support. The CNCF operates within the Linux Foundation, a non-profit based in San Francisco, and a European organisation should weigh that legal framework. Because the framework runs on the organisation's own machines, data location and operational control stay local. It gives edge and on-premises Linux nodes a self-managed, open-source foundation without a mandatory hosted service.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Kairos pre-selected

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Sovereignty score

69 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-210
Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
Data residency SOV-3100
No hosting in Europe (US)
Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-390
Self-hostable: encryption keys under your own control
Freedom from lock-in SOV-680
Open source: low switching costs
Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-665
Source code auditable, forkable and self-hostable

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 12, 2026

Headquarters	US (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision	Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty model	Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting	USVerified by hand
Open-source	YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	NoVendor-stated
Category	Virtualisation & Containers
Type	Product
Website	kairos.io ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Kairos

The European alternatives to Kairos come from our knowledge base of over 7,800 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

23 European Virtualisation & Containers vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Kairos

Kairos is headquartered in the United States. US vendors fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA 702: US authorities can compel access to data, even when that data sits in a European data centre. That is the core of the jurisdictional exposure in our model.

Kairos hosts data outside the EU (US). Personal data therefore leaves the EU, which requires a transfer mechanism under the GDPR and pulls the data residency score down.

Kairos is open source. You can audit the source code, self-host the software and keep the encryption keys under your own control. Switching is easier because data and software are not tied to a single party.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Kairos together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Kairos?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Kairos include APPUiO (VSHN), Capsule and Gardener. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Kairos?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Kairos include Capsule, Gardener, Giant Swarm, Harvester, IncludeOS, K3s and Kamaji. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is Kairos GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Kairos is headquartered in US and hosts data in US. Its GDPR compliance is limited or unclear. For full EU data residency the EU alternatives on this page usually offer more certainty.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 12, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Cyber Resilience Act

Public signals that relate to the EU Cyber Resilience Act. They do not count towards the score. A missing line means "not found publicly".

We found none of these signals on the vendor's own site when we checked.

For products in scope of the CRA, CE marking is required from 11 December 2027; this cannot be checked yet.

Checked on October 12, 2026. What is the Cyber Resilience Act?

Digital sovereignty in Virtualisation & Containers

Virtualisation & Containers: Virtualisation platforms, container management, Kubernetes distributions and hypervisors. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

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