Sovereign cloud hosting
from Germany

Specifically, this means:

• Your workloads run either on local NVMe storage or on replicated and distributed Ceph storage with dedicated vCPU allocation.
• Your data is stored exclusively in our two data centers in Nuremberg, which are ISO/IEC 27001-certified, with no U.S. parent company involved.
• NVIDIA GPUs for ML Workloads
• Air-gapped backups for ransomware protection and full OpenStack API compatibility for Terraform and Ansible are included—no add-ons, no extra charges
• There is no minimum contract term. You pay by the hour for what you actually use.

And if something doesn't work, you can reach an NWS MyEngineer® 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 world's most widely used open-source cloud platform—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 that together form a complete cloud infrastructure.

"Managed" means: You use this platform without having to operate it yourself. NWS installs, configures, patches, and monitors the entire OpenStack stack in our data centers in Nuremberg. You’ll have access via the MyNWS dashboard, the native OpenStack API, or the CLI, and you can immediately launch VMs, configure networks, or provision storage—all 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.

NETWAYS Cloud Services are billed hourly—you pay exactly for what you actually use. There is no monthly base fee or minimum purchase requirement.

Pricing starts at €14.38 net per month for an s1.small instance with 2 vCPUs, 2 GB of RAM, and 25 GB of local NVMe storage. All instance families—General Purpose (s1), Performance Optimized (p1), and Dedicated (d1)—are billed on an hourly basis. GPU instances with NVIDIA A10, A40, or RTX 6000 Blackwell (96 GB VRAM) can also be booked by the hour, 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.

Getting started involves three steps: Create an NWS account, start an OpenStack project, and get started. Once you've registered, you'll have immediate access—no waiting, no manual activation required.

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. Those who prefer Infrastructure as Code can use the native OpenStack API: Terraform, Ansible, and Pulumi work with the OpenStack provider right away, without proprietary wrappers or new dependencies.

Your first VM will be up and running in under two minutes. Select an operating system, flavor, and SSH key—and you're done. Additional resources such as storage volumes, S3 buckets, load balancers, and GPU instances can be provisioned via the same API or the dashboard.

To get started quickly , we recommend checking out our documentation. There you'll find quickstarts for Terraform, Kubernetes, and S3.

• At the infrastructure level: Both data centers in Nuremberg are ISO/IEC 27001-certified and feature 24/7 video surveillance and access control. The network infrastructure is carrier-neutral and connected with multiple layers of redundancy.
• Regarding data protection: NWS is a German company. All data remains in Germany. No transfer to third countries, no risk under the U.S. CLOUD Act. We enter into a data processing agreement with each customer in accordance with Article 28 of the GDPR.
• At the operational level: Air-gapped backups are written to a storage cluster that is physically isolated from the network, making them 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.

If you have any questions or issues, you can reach us directly in Nuremberg. You can contact us by email or phone. In addition, our on-call service is available 24/7.

For more in-depth support, the MyEngineer® service is available: a dedicated engineer who is familiar with your setup, advises you on architectural decisions, and guides you through 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.

With NWS Cloud Services, there is no minimum contract term. You can cancel on a monthly basis: no notice period, no cancellation fees, and no refunds for resources already used.

Billing is hourly: You pay exactly for what you’ve actually used during 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 true flexibility: use NWS for a project for three months, cancel afterward, and restart at any time if needed. There is no setup fee for new projects. The NWS account itself is free; costs are incurred only for resources that are actually used.

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

Yes, and the most important thing isn't the price, but independence.

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 companies in Germany that offers engineering support for this transition: from assessing your existing VMware environment to a phased migration to production.

Complete VMware Comparison