Overview

Functional Goals

• Developer-friendly platform for deploying and operating applications.
• Multi-tenant by design, enabling organizational growth and flexible tenant management.
• Managed infrastructure that abstracts compute, storage, and networking for ease of use and consistency.
• Managed orchestration layer to simplify workload scheduling, scaling, and lifecycle management.
• Built-in platform services for common needs such as application delivery, compute, and data persistence.
• Extensible through pluggable services, allowing tenants to autonomously evolve and customize their technology stack.
• Horizontally scalable foundation capable of supporting thousands of tenants and large-scale infrastructure footprints.
• Strict tenant isolation with a shared-nothing architecture for compute and storage, ensuring reliability and predictable performance.

And fundamentally:

• Secure by default.
• Highly available under heavy demand or failure conditions.
• Fast, delivering responsive operations at every layer.

Non-goals

• Public Cloud: Fundament is not a public cloud offering. It is designed to be self-hosted by organizations as a private or community cloud.

How?

Fundament integrates metal-stack for automated bare-metal provisioning and Gardener for Kubernetes cluster management into a complete cloud solution. This combination delivers Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) through a reliable, high-performance foundation without unnecessary complexity, while maintaining full compatibility with existing cloud-native practices.

On top of this IaaS layer, Fundament provides Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities through a developer-friendly, multi-tenant platform that abstracts infrastructure and orchestration into a simple, scalable service. Core capabilities -such as compute, storage, and networking- are managed out of the box, while higher-level features are delivered as Tools. These Tools may wrap proven open-source projects to provide cloud services such as load balancing, databases, or object storage.

The result is an autonomous, extensible, and self-hosted platform: secure by default, highly available under load, fast in operation, and designed to scale from a handful of tenants to thousands.

Open Source Mindset

Fundament builds on top of existing Open Source projects. This has a number of benefits:

• Building on the expertise and community support of existing projects.
• Enabling customization and extension of existing projects to meet specific needs.
• Giving back to the community by adding features and improvements to existing projects.
• No need to re-invent the wheel; more time and energy can go to developing and improving the Fundament platform.

Fundament strongly avoids proprietary software and closed-source solutions.