TUHH: Projekt 8 - Vattenfall

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Vattenfall (Vattenfall Europe Information Services GmbH)

Sovereign Hosting Platform: Building an Independent Infrastructure for Modern Web Applications

Description of the company

Vattenfall Europe Information Services GmbH (VEIS) is Vattenfall’s IT organization in Germany. VEIS develops, operates, and supports digital solutions, applications, platforms, and IT infrastructures for the business areas of the Vattenfall Group, thereby making a significant contribution to the digitalization of the energy industry.

Situation

The IT landscape of German companies is highly dependent on the software and infrastructure of non-eu providers:

Infrastructure services from non-eu providers as the basis for the hosting infrastructure

Database management systems from non-eu providers

Functional components from non-eu providers which enable the solution architecture in areas such as messaging or authentication

Problem

In its 2025 study “European software and cyber dependencies”, the European Parliament refers to geopolitical and economic risks resulting from dependencies on non-European software and cloud services: “Europe’s digital ecosystem remains heavily dependent on non-EU software and cloud providers, primarily US firms, creating strategic vulnerabilities”.

Given this information Vattenfall as a provider of critical infrastructure owned by the Swedish state has a specific responsibility to build a resilient architecture.

Aims of the project

We have identified the central parts of our existing architecture, for which the dependencies to non-eu partners lead to specifically high risks.

We want to build a system holistically considering the infrastructure as well as the application layer with the aim of confirming that it is possible to run our business meanwhile staying as independent as possible.

We only considered infrastructure provided by EU companies and for software we focused on picking open-source projects.

To kick the project off the students will start by creating the hardware-, networking-, and platform-infrastructure. This should then be followed up by the students creating a small frontend and backend application. The two applications will be integrated with each other and confirm the operations of core functionalities such as: user logins, accessing backend data via API or database access.

In a further step, the project members should develop and implement a concept for observability of the infrastructure. This includes, for example, implementing a dashboard that can be used to monitor the status and availability of the infrastructure.

Scopes

Joint implementation of the project in an agile team using proven agile project management methods and practices (e.g. Scrum, Kanban).
Set up an infrastructure layer on which our frontend applications and backend services can run.
Set up a PaaS layer that orchestrates our applications and services in the form of containers.
Create services that enable our solution architecture (IAM solution, messaging, secret management).
Set up a database layer that hosts an open-source database solution and stores our relational data in persistent volumes.
Set up the network architecture, with the infrastructure and database layers located in a private network. Access to this network should be enabled by a load balancer.
Trial operation of a frontend and a backend application that tests all of the points mentioned above.
Design and implementation of an observability solution for the hosting platform that centrally visualises and monitors, for example, the status of the infrastructure, containers, applications, databases, authentication services, and backups. The solution should provide a dashboard.

Target group (students)

Bachelor (4th semester or higher)