Sovereign Cloud Infrastructure
from Germany

In concrete terms, this means that your workloads run on either local NVMe storage or replicated and distributed Ceph storage with dedicated vCPU allocation. Your data is stored exclusively in our two data centers in Nuremberg, ISO/IEC 27001-certified, without a US parent company in the background. NVIDIA GPUs for ML workloads, air gapped backups for ransomware protection and full OpenStack API compatibility for Terraform and Ansible are included - no add-on, no extra charge.

There is no minimum contract term. You pay hourly for what you actually use. And if something doesn't work, you can reach a NETWAYS engineer in Nuremberg.

Our NETWAYS Cloud Services offering is essentially a managed OpenStack environment. We have developed an OpenStack tutorial series that gives you a step-by-step introduction to OpenStack and the benefits of our managed services. Have a look!

OpenStack is the most widely used open source cloud platform in the world - used by CERN, BMW and Deutsche Telekom. It consists of several components: Nova (compute), Cinder (block storage), Neutron (networking), Swift (object storage), Octavia (load balancer) and other services, which together form a complete cloud infrastructure.

"Managed" means: You use this platform without operating it yourself. NWS installs, configures, patches and monitors the entire OpenStack stack in our data centers in Nuremberg. You get access via the MyNWS dashboard, the native OpenStack API or CLI - and can immediately start VMs, configure networks or book storage without hiring a single OpenStack administrator.

The key difference to proprietary clouds is that the OpenStack API is an open standard. What you configure with NWS today can be ported to any other OpenStack provider tomorrow. No lock-in.

You can find even more information and examples in our OpenStack tutorials.

Entry starts at €14.38 net per month** for an s1.small instance with 2 vCPUs, 2 GB RAM and 25 GB local NVMe storage. All instance families - General Purpose (s1), Performance Optimized (p1) and Dedicated (d1) - are billed at the same hourly rate. GPU instances with NVIDIA A10, A40 or RTX 6000 Blackwell (96 GB VRAM) can also be booked on an hourly basis, without an annual contract.

Storage volumes, snapshots, S3 object storage and load balancers are billed separately and based on consumption. There are no additional costs for API usage or CLI access.

You can find the exact billing details for individual resources on our pricing page.

From there, you choose your path. The **MyNWS dashboard** provides a graphical interface for VMs, networks, storage and backups - for teams that don't need a CLI. If you prefer Infrastructure as Code, use the native **OpenStack API**: Terraform, Ansible and Pulumi work out of the box with the OpenStack Provider, without proprietary wrappers or new dependencies.

Your first VM starts in under two minutes. Select the operating system, flavor and SSH key - done. Additional resources such as storage volumes, S3 buckets, load balancers and GPU instances can be booked via the same API or the dashboard.

For a quick start, we recommend our documentation at docs.nws.netways.de - there you will find quickstarts for Terraform, Kubernetes and S3.

At infrastructure level: Both data centers in Nuremberg are certified in accordance with ISO/IEC 27001:2013, with 24/7 video surveillance and access control. The network infrastructure is carrier-neutral and has multiple redundant connections.

At data protection level: NETWAYS is a German company. All data remains in Germany - no transfer to third countries, no US CLOUD Act risk. We conclude a data processing agreement with every customer in accordance with Art. 28 GDPR.

At operational level: Air Gapped Backups write to a storage cluster that is physically separated from the network - immune to ransomware and accidental deletion. For payment data, our infrastructure complies with the PCI DSS standard.

Technical and organizational measures (TOMs) and ISO certificates are available for regulated industries.

For more in-depth support, the **MyEngineer®** service is available: a dedicated NETWAYS engineer who knows your setup, advises on architecture decisions and accompanies migrations - from planning to production.

We've been running OpenStack for over a decade. The people who support you are the same people who run the infrastructure.

Billing is hourly: you pay for exactly what you have actually used in a calendar month. If you delete a VM after five days, you pay for five days - not for a full month. This applies equally to compute instances, storage volumes, S3 buckets, load balancers and GPU instances.

In practice, this means real flexibility: use NWS for a project for three months, then cancel and start again at any time if required - with the same conditions, without renegotiation. There is no set-up fee for new projects. The NWS account itself is free of charge; costs are only incurred for resources actually used.

We are happy to discuss individual framework agreements for companies with predictable workloads.

Since the Broadcom acquisition, many companies have reported VMware license increases of between 300% and 1,000%. OpenStack is open source: there is no manufacturer that can change license models, discontinue product lines or force upgrades.

Technically, the change is more direct than many expect: OpenStack Compute (Nova) replaces ESXi, Ceph block storage replaces vSAN, OVN-SDN replaces VMware NSX. Existing VM images can be migrated via `virt-v2v`. Terraform and Ansible, which you already use, work with the OpenStack Provider without new dependencies.

As a KCSP-certified OpenStack provider, NWS is one of the few in Germany to offer this change with engineering support - from the inventory of your existing VMware environment to the rolling migration into production.

Complete VMware comparison