Red Hat OpenShift reaches general availability in Google Cloud sovereign regions

Red Hat has announced the general availability of OpenShift Container Platform 4.22.16 and subsequent versions within Google Cloud Dedicated's sovereign regions. This deployment targets highly regulated industries and public sector entities that require strict data residency and operational sovereignty to comply with mandates like GDPR.

The service is currently available in two specific regions: Berlin, Germany (u-germany-northeast1) and Eastern France (u-france-east1), with support for three availability zones per region. Unlike standard public cloud deployments, these environments are operated by local partners who maintain administrative control over the infrastructure to ensure complete isolation.

Technical deployment and architecture requirements

• Architecture and Compute: The deployment is restricted to x86_64 architectures, supporting C3, M3, and A3 Edge machine series with hyperdisk-balanced storage; ARM-based machine types are currently unavailable.
• Automated Provisioning: The OpenShift installer utilizes Installer-Provisioned Infrastructure (IPI) and automatically detects the sovereign environment via domain-scoped project IDs and region prefixes to route cluster operators to local API endpoints instead of global googleapis.com.
• Storage and Networking Constraints: Users must manually switch the default storage class to hyperdisk-balanced as pd-ssd is unavailable, and networking is limited to private DNS zones without support for shared VPCs or Private Service Connect endpoint overrides.
• Security and OS Management: Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) images must be manually uploaded to the project since they are not pre-published, and encryption requires the use of regional Key Management Service (KMS) keys rather than global keys.

Why it matters

This expansion provides enterprise users with a consistent hybrid cloud experience while meeting stringent legal requirements for data sovereignty. It allows organizations to run containerized workloads and sovereign AI models on isolated, partner-operated infrastructure without abandoning the Red Hat OpenShift tooling ecosystem.