Cloud computing is dominated by a handful of global corporations that push regional IT providers out of the market through financial strength, subsidies, and lock-in strategies. The Cloud of Amsterdam project offers a concrete alternative to this concentration: a regional, sustainable, and openly documented cloud infrastructure for the province of North Holland — operated on refurbished hardware in an Amsterdam data center, featuring an open system to measure the environmental impact of each individual workload.

The project consortium consisting of IDED (then SDIA), Quanza, and Aknostic has established a Kubernetes cluster infrastructure on refurbished HP Enterprise servers at NovoServe in Amsterdam. At the same time, IDED developed an environmental impact reporting system based on ISO standards 14004 and 14044 for lifecycle assessments, and released it as an open-source project. The pilot customer was Helio Rendering, a provider of cloud-based 3D rendering, which uses the system's real-time environmental data to optimize its workloads.

Project results:

• Kubernetes cluster on refurbished hardware: Fully deployed cluster infrastructure at NovoServe Amsterdam, operated without proprietary dependencies and compatible with standard Kubernetes workloads

• Open environmental impact reporting system: ISO-14004/14044-compliant measurement system that measures and reports energy consumption, operational GHG emissions, grey emissions of server hardware, and abiotic resource consumption at workload level

• No vendor lock-in: The architecture exclusively uses open-source technologies, and proprietary APIs were completely avoided — workloads can be freely migrated

• Cloud-agnostic architecture: The cluster design is transferable to multiple data center locations and hosting providers

• Open-source publication: All developed tools and methods were made publicly available to facilitate further regional initiatives