Help teams code faster and run anywhere, with confidence and control. We believe cloud infrastructure should be an enabler, not a bottleneck.
In the debate over IT modernization, a comfortable yet dangerous narrative has taken hold: the idea that cloud sovereignty is a spectrum, a scale of greys where "a little compliance" is still a step in the right direction.
Provisioning is just the beginning In the lifecycle of cloud infrastructure, provisioning is often seen as the finish line. Once the environment is defined and deployed, the job feels done. The code has been reviewed, the resources are running, services are responding. From that point on, it seems like it’s just a matter of keeping things going. But in reality, that’s when the most critical part begins. That’s where the real cost of infrastructure starts to surface (the part you don’t see immediately), but that gradually becomes heavier with time. Environments that were supposed to be identical begin to behave differently. Security patches are applied in some places, missed in others. Configuration drifts start to appear. Coherence slowly fades, and with it, confidence in the system. If you've worked in production, you know this too well. Many incidents don’t happen during provisioning, but weeks or months later when something that was working just fine suddenly fails. The root cause isn’t always in the code. Often, it lies in what changed over time, unnoticed and unmanaged.
"Cloud-Agnostic" is one of the most seductive and misunderstood buzzwords in our industry. For years, we've been sold a utopia: the promise of building an application once and then freely moving it between AWS, Azure, and GCP with a single click, as if they were interchangeable utilities. In 2025, it's time to say it clearly: this idea no longer reflects the complexity of real-world cloud architectures. Chasing the "run anywhere" myth leads companies to build bland, lowest-common-denominator systems that fail to leverage the true power of any cloud. You end up paying the price of the cloud without enjoying its main benefits. But this doesn't mean the idea is worthless. It just means the real value isn't where we've been told to look. True "cloud-agnostic" isn't about [i]implementation portability[/i]; it's about [i]architecture standardization.[/i]
Today we are adding Hetzner Cloud to Fractal Cloud. Teams that choose Hetzner for European sovereignty can now provision secure, production‑ready Kubernetes and move workloads across vendors with a single, automated workflow. The result is developer self service with governance built in, and a clear path to sovereign multicloud without lock in. [img]https://fractal.cloud/uploads/1758806309310_1_66eb622018.svg[/img]
In cloud engineering, there is a fundamental truth: systems fail. It's not a matter of "if," but "when." Provider Service Level Agreements (SLAs), with their "nines" (99.9%, 99.99%), are not a promise of infallible uptime; they are the contractual guarantee that failures, however rare, are an expected part of the service. The "Shared Responsibility" model is clear: the provider is responsible for the reliability of the infrastructure, while we are responsible for the reliability of our applications running on it. When a core service or an entire region goes offline, it's not a "betrayal." It's an expected operational event. The real question isn't why it happened, but how we respond.
For years, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has promised us the ability to manage cloud complexity with the same efficiency as application code. Tools based on declarative languages and YAML configuration files have revolutionized the way we work, allowing us to define our desired state. But let's be honest: how many times have we found ourselves copying and pasting hundreds of lines of YAML, only to change a couple of values? How often have we fought with the syntax of a loop in a configuration language or skipped writing a test because "it's just config"? This approach, while powerful, has forced us to operate with a limited set of tools. Complex logic, reusability, and testability remain painful. It gave us the "Code" part of IaC, but it deprived us of the "Engineering" part. What if we could overcome these limits? What if we could define our infrastructure using the same power, flexibility, and patterns we use to build our business applications? This is the paradigm shift that an SDK in a true programming language brings to the table.
A security team resolves a critical vulnerability. An architect defines a flawless resilience pattern. A database expert optimizes a complex query. In most companies, these solutions remain tacit knowledge, dispensed through manual consultations that don't scale. What if every solution could be transformed into a reusable digital asset, instantly available to the entire organization? In the age of cloud and DevOps, the "you build it, you run it" mantra has given development teams great autonomy, but it has also buried them in enormous complexity. To manage this chaos, many organizations created centralized teams of experts. Unfortunately, these teams often turned into well-intentioned but ineffective gatekeepers—bottlenecks that slow down innovation with manual reviews. This article isn't about replacing one tool with another. It's about a more profound shift: how to move beyond the gatekeeper model to transform expert teams from guardians into value catalysts, through a new socio-technical paradigm: [b]Platform Engineering[/b] and the [b]"Platform as a Product"[/b] concept.
In the modern DevOps cycle, and with the rising adoption of Platform Engineering, many teams operate with distributed tools that separately handle provisioning, configuration, monitoring, and compliance. This approach increases dependence on cloud specialists and makes it difficult to maintain consistency across environments. With Fractal Cloud, these activities are integrated into a single Internal Developer Platform (IDP). Governance, security, and automation are embedded into versioned and reusable components called [b][i]Fractals[/i][/b], which include technical blueprints, policies, and managed operations.
Fractal Architecture is a Platform Engineering model designed for simplifying infrastructure definition for complex, multi-cloud, and regulated enterprise environments. It enables development teams to operate with declarative autonomy within a secure, versioned, and governed infrastructure system. Through a composable, automated, and compliance-by-design approach, it reduces operational debt and accelerates platform evolution. Fractal Cloud implements this model by transforming infrastructure into a system of modular, versioned components that are automated and mapped to shared policies.