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ADR-0003: Bare-metal infrastructure

Proposed
Status

proposed

Date

2026-03-09

Group

hardware

Depends-on

ADR-0001, ADR-0002

Context

Fundament needs a compute foundation for multi-tenant Kubernetes. Government requirements: data residency in NL, full-stack auditability, no dependency on non-European vendors.

Options

Option 1: Bare-metal in government datacenters

  • Pros: full sovereignty, lowest cost at scale, auditable from firmware up

  • Cons: high upfront investment, requires DC operations expertise

Option 2: Managed Kubernetes on public cloud (EKS/AKS/GKE)

  • Pros: fastest to production, elastic scaling

  • Cons: non-EU vendor dependency, fails EUCS SEAL-4 sovereignty

Option 3: OpenStack + Kubernetes on VMs

  • Pros: mature multi-tenancy, VM+container coexistence

  • Cons: two platforms to operate, virtualization overhead

Option 4: Hybrid (bare-metal + public cloud overflow)

  • Pros: sovereignty for sensitive, elasticity for the rest

  • Cons: two operational models, data classification complexity

Decision

Bare-metal. Sovereignty and cost at scale outweigh initial investment. VM support via KubeVirt on bare-metal where needed, no separate virtualization layer.

Consequences

  • Requires bare-metal provisioning tooling (separate ADR)

  • Requires cluster lifecycle management (separate ADR)

  • Requires explicit DC network design (separate ADR)