From now on you can pick STACKIT as your cloud in the Vela Atlas configurator, alongside Google Cloud, AWS and Scaleway. You select a provider, Vela Atlas builds the rest: a complete, running project with cluster, database, registry, Terraform and CI/CD. With STACKIT, that foundation can now sit on a cloud operated in Germany.
Who is behind STACKIT
STACKIT is the cloud of Schwarz Digits, the IT and digital arm of the Schwarz Group, which includes Lidl and Kaufland. The data centres are located in Germany, and the operator is a German company. For teams who see data sovereignty not just as a question of location but also of ownership, that is a difference compared to a US cloud with a European region.
The practical effect: your data falls under European law and sits outside the reach of the US CLOUD Act. In public tenders and regulated industries, that is increasingly a requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
What you get on STACKIT with Vela Atlas
Pick STACKIT in the configurator and Vela Atlas ships your project with:
- SKE, the STACKIT Kubernetes Engine, as a managed cluster
- Managed PostgreSQL Flex for your database
- Container Registry for your images
- Ingress through a reserved public IP, bound to ingress-nginx
- Terraform modules and a GitHub Actions pipeline tailored to STACKIT
The Terraform state lives in STACKIT Object Storage, which is addressed in an S3-compatible way. So you do not need a third-party backend provider just to store your state.
The difference in authentication
As with Scaleway, the most noticeable difference to GCP and AWS is authentication. STACKIT offers no OIDC federation for GitHub Actions, the mechanism GCP and AWS use for short-lived tokens. Instead, the pipeline authenticates with a service account token that you store as a GitHub Actions secret.
The token is long-lived and has a fixed lifetime, so you should rotate it before it expires, otherwise your pipeline stops. The init script creates the service account and prints the token for you, and your delivered handbook walks you through rotation step by step.
A second point concerns the database. Managed PostgreSQL Flex is not exposed through a private network but through an allowlist. Vela Atlas enters your cluster’s outbound IP ranges there, so your services can reach the database and nobody else can.
When a hyperscaler is still the right call
If you need maximum service breadth or one specific specialised product, AWS and GCP cover more ground. STACKIT focuses on the building blocks most projects actually need. For a typical stack of Kubernetes, PostgreSQL and container registry, that is enough, and that is exactly the stack Vela Atlas delivers.
Because the provider is a configuration choice with us, the decision costs you no rebuild. You pick a different cloud on your next project and get the same structure.
Conclusion
With STACKIT you now have a second European option in the configurator, and with it a cloud that is operated in Germany and owned by a German company. Your project is set up in the same time as with any other provider. Vela Atlas delivers the foundation, you decide where it stands.