Our story
Three things went wrong with cloud at the same time. None of them is fixable with a discount.
We spent our careers running other people's infrastructure — datacentres, hypervisors, Kubernetes clusters, and the invoices that arrived at the end of the month. The same three problems kept turning up at companies that had nothing else in common.
The bill stopped describing the work
Egress, cross-zone traffic, IOPS tiers, per-request charges, support plans. The unit of billing drifted so far from the unit of work that teams could no longer answer the simplest question: what does this service cost to run?
Finance stopped asking and started budgeting for the surprise.
The region stopped meaning the jurisdiction
A region in Frankfurt is a location, not a legal status. While the operating company answers to a non-EU government, "our data stays in Europe" is a configuration setting, not a guarantee.
After Schrems II that distinction moved out of the legal footnotes and into procurement.
Power became the real constraint
In the Netherlands, grid capacity — not floor space, not budget — decides where a rack can go. Connection queues are years long.
Meanwhile the largest thing a datacentre produces, heat, was still being blown into the sky while the greenhouse down the road burned gas.
What we built instead
None of the three is a pricing problem, so we started at the architecture. GRN.CLOUD is a Dutch company running Dutch hardware on a single platform: OpenShift/Kubernetes, with KubeVirt so virtual machines are scheduled by the same control plane as containers — same network policy, same storage classes, same RBAC, same API.
One platform to learn. One place to enforce policy. One bill to read.
- Kubernetes
- KubeVirt
- Ceph
- OVN-Kubernetes
- Prometheus
- Argo CD
- Priced like a utility. Published per-hour rates for CPU, memory, storage and GPU, a prepaid wallet so the ceiling is one you set, and no charge for the traffic that leaves our network.
- Sovereign by structure, not by policy. A Dutch company, Dutch datacentres, Dutch law. There is no parent entity in another jurisdiction for a foreign authority to serve.
- Powered by the sun, finished in a greenhouse. Solar generation with peak shaving to stay off a congested grid, and server heat piped into greenhouses and buildings next door. Our waste output is someone else's input.
- Open source all the way down. Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Ceph, OVN, Prometheus, Argo CD. Nothing proprietary sits between you and the exit.
Infrastructure is converging on Kubernetes as the control plane for everything — containers, virtual machines, functions, model serving — and diverging on jurisdiction. Nearly every team we talk to wants the first without surrendering the second.
We think the default European stack of the next decade is open source, operated by companies that actually live under the law they invoke, on power a grid operator is glad to see connected.
