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+---
+layout: post
+title: Why weSystems Wear their „CloudStack“ in Public
+tags: [roundup]
+authors: [ivet]
+slug: wesystems-wear-cloudstack
+---
+
+A guest post by [Alexander Monderkamp](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-monderkamp-a1a9b4171/), weSystems
+
+![](stand.png "the festival stand overview")
+
+## A logo on a T-shirt and what it stands for
+At this year's TechRiders Festival in Hürth, Germany, three people
+walked around a tech event in polo shirts carrying the Apache
+CloudStack logo. Not as a statement. Not as a marketing move. Simply
+because it is part of who they are and what they do every day.
+
+<!-- truncate -->
+
+But why does a managed services provider and cloud operator wear open
+source on its sleeve, literally and professionally? The answer starts
+with a technology decision weSystems made years ago and have never had
+reason to revisit. Read their full story and engagement with the
+CloudStack project in their own words below!
+
+## How weSystems got there?
+
+weSystems is an IT infrastructure and managed services provider based
+in Germany. We build and operate infrastructure for mid-sized and
+larger companies, running our own cloud out of certified German data
+centers. When we set out to build that cloud, we had a fundamental
+question to answer: which technology do we trust to run it?
+
+We chose Apache CloudStack. Not because it was the most talked-about
+option at the time, but because it was the right one for what we
+needed to build. That was several years ago. The decision has held up
+ever since.
+
+## The thing that actually matters: multi-tenancy done right
+
+There are many things to appreciate about Apache CloudStack, but if we
+had to name the single most important reason it powers our cloud, it
+would be its multi-tenancy architecture.
+
+We operate infrastructure for multiple customers simultaneously. Those
+customers must never see each other, interfere with each other or
+share resources in ways they have not explicitly agreed to. In a
+managed cloud environment, that isolation is not a nice-to-have. It is
+the foundation on which trust is built.
+
+CloudStack handles this elegantly. Each customer operates within a
+fully isolated environment. The boundaries are real, not cosmetic. And
+the overhead of managing those boundaries does not fall on us in ways
+that would make the whole operation brittle or expensive to run.
+
+This is worth saying explicitly because not every platform gets this
+right. Some alternatives that often come up in conversations,
+including Proxmox, are excellent tools for certain use cases but were
+not designed with true multi-tenancy in mind. Running multiple
+isolated customer environments on them requires workarounds that
+introduce complexity and risk. With CloudStack, multi-tenancy is not a
+workaround. It is built into the architecture.
+
+## Open source as infrastructure philosophy
+Beyond the technical capabilities, there is something else that
+matters to us about Apache CloudStack, and it connects to a
+conversation that is increasingly relevant in the European IT
+landscape.
+
+Digital sovereignty is not only about where your data is stored. It is
+also about which software runs your infrastructure and who controls
+its future. Proprietary platforms come with roadmaps you cannot
+influence, licensing models that can change and dependencies that are
+difficult to exit. Open source turns that equation around.
+
+With Apache CloudStack, we can read the code, understand exactly what
+it does, contribute to its development and adapt it where our
+customers' needs require it. We are not dependent on a single vendor's
+decisions about which features get built or which customers get
+priority support. The community decides together, and the code is
+transparent.
+
+For a company that has built its reputation on being a trustworthy,
+independent partner rather than a product reseller, that philosophy
+resonates deeply. We tell our customers they should avoid
+infrastructure decisions that leave them locked in and unable to
+change course. It would be inconsistent to build our own cloud on a
+foundation that does exactly that.
+
+![](playing.png "the crew playing")
+
+## What we have learned over the years
+Running Apache CloudStack in production for multiple customers over
+many years has given us a level of familiarity with the platform that
+goes beyond documentation. We have learned where it excels, where it
+requires care and where the community's collective knowledge is the
+most valuable resource available.
+
+We have also learned that the knowledge concentrated in the CloudStack
+community is genuinely rare. The people who work with this platform
+seriously tend to understand infrastructure at a depth that broader
+cloud conversations often skip past. That is part of why events and
+community touchpoints matter, and part of why we show up to a
+motorsport-themed tech festival with the logo on our shirts.
+
+## Why we think more companies should know about this
+Apache CloudStack rarely gets the marketing budget that some of its
+alternatives enjoy. It does not have a large commercial entity pushing
+it into every conference keynote. What it has is a community of
+operators who have chosen it because it solves real problems well.
+
+For European companies thinking carefully about their infrastructure
+choices, particularly those who care about sovereignty, auditability
+and avoiding lock-in, it deserves far more attention than it typically
+gets. The technology is mature, the architecture is sound and the
+community is the kind that answers real questions with real
+experience.
+
+We are glad to be part of it. And we will keep wearing the logo.
+
+## About weSystems
+weSystems is an IT infrastructure and managed services provider
+operating their own German cloud in certified German data
+centers. They build, operate and support infrastructure for mid-sized
+and enterprise customers who value reliability, independence and a
+partner that picks up the phone.