EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceVirtualisation & ContainersHeadquarters: US

Kubernetes: sovereignty score and 7 European alternatives

Kubernetes is an open-source platform for managing containerised workloads and services. Teams describe the desired state of their applications declaratively, and Kubernetes works towards that state: it places containers on nodes, balances traffic and exposes services through DNS, mounts storage, rolls out and rolls back changes, scales workloads, restarts failed containers and manages secrets and configuration. You install and operate Kubernetes yourself on a cluster of nodes, or use it through a provider's managed offering.

Google designed Kubernetes and released it as open source in 2014 under the Apache License 2.0. The project is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), part of the Linux Foundation, which holds the trademark; it is maintained by a worldwide community of contributors. Because the code is open and runs on any infrastructure, a European organisation can operate clusters on servers or with cloud providers in the EU and decide for itself where workloads and data reside.

See the 7 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Kubernetes pre-selected
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Sovereignty score
71 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-210
    Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    EU-only hosting
  • 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-675
    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 September 21, 2026
HeadquartersUS (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decisionOnly for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty modelOpen-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hostingEUVerified by hand
Open-sourceYesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
Hosting signalAMAZON-02 - Amazon.com, Inc., US (US)Technically measured
CategoryVirtualisation & Containers
TypeProduct
Websitekubernetes.io ↗

The hosting signal shows the network that serves the vendor's website, often a CDN, and not necessarily where the service or your data is hosted. How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Kubernetes

The European alternatives to Kubernetes come from our knowledge base of over 6,200 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

20 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 Kubernetes

Kubernetes 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.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so Kubernetes scores best on data residency.

Kubernetes 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 Kubernetes 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 Kubernetes?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Kubernetes include K3s, Kubermatic and APPUiO (VSHN). On this page you can compare 7 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Kubernetes?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Kubernetes include K3s, Kubermatic, Kamaji, metal-stack and Rancher Desktop. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Kubernetes is headquartered in US and hosts data in EU. The vendor states it is GDPR-compliant, but the data falls under non-EU jurisdiction. 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 September 21, 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".

Report a vulnerability
kubernetes.io/docs/reference/issues-security/security/
security.txt
kubernetes.io/.well-known/security.txt
Supported versions
kubernetes.io/releases/patch-releases/
Organisation behind the open-source project
Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)

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

Checked on October 9, 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.

Also in this category

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7 European alternatives to Kubernetes — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score