STAKATER STAKATER The Playbook
For CSPs, MSPs, and telcos ready to turn infrastructure into a product.
The VMware migration is creating a once-in-a-decade opportunity for service providers.
Millions of workloads need a new home. Every organisation managing those workloads needs a new platform โ and a new commercial model on top.
Enterprise-grade, battle-tested, Red Hat backed. The de-facto choice for the next-generation cloud. The infrastructure problem is solved.
The service providers who build a cloud product now define the market. Late movers become customers of the ones who moved first.
A cloud business has three layers. Most service providers only have one.
Layer 3 โ What you sell
Self-service portal ยท Service catalog ยท SLA-backed plans ยท Cost transparency ยท Your brand
Layer 2 โ What governs it
โ Stakater Cloud Orchestrator
Multi-tenancy ยท Governance ยท Metering ยท API-first automation ยท White-label control plane
Layer 1 โ What runs it
โ Red Hat OpenShift โ Solved
OpenShift Container Platform ยท OpenShift Virtualization ยท OpenShift Data Foundation
The foundation. You may already have this.
Enterprise Kubernetes. Runs containerised workloads at scale. The operating system for your cloud.
Run VMs alongside containers on the same platform. The direct VMware replacement โ without the lock-in.
Enterprise storage โ block, file, object. Runs on your hardware. No external storage vendor needed.
Why it matters
Enterprise infrastructure takes years to build and battle-test. OpenShift gives you that foundation on day one โ Red Hat backed, enterprise supported, sovereign-ready.
Now build the business on top of it.
The commercial layer OpenShift doesn't ship with โ and every cloud business needs.
Many customers sharing the same infrastructure โ completely isolated from each other by architecture, not configuration. No lateral exposure between tenants.
Customers provision and manage their own resources through your branded portal. No tickets. No waiting. No engineering involvement per request.
Define, publish, and sell services โ VMs, Kubernetes clusters, databases, backups. New offerings go live the day you decide to sell them.
Usage tracked per tenant, per service, per resource. Real-time cost transparency for your customers. Feed directly to your billing system.
Policies, quotas, RBAC, and compliance controls โ defined once, enforced everywhere. Audit trail out of the box.
Your brand, your domain, your experience. Customers never see the infrastructure underneath. You are the cloud provider.
Define your service catalog. These are the services your customers can provision on demand.
Self-service VM provisioning on OpenShift Virtualization. Pick size, OS, storage.
Dedicated or shared OpenShift clusters โ provisioned in minutes, not weeks.
Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis โ self-provisioned, backed up, monitored.
Backup-as-a-Service, monitoring, custom workloads โ if it runs on OpenShift, it can be a catalog item.
New services go live the day you decide to sell them. No custom integration work per offering.
Cloud Orchestrator gives you the commercial levers to build a real cloud business model.
Different quotas, SLAs, and price points per tier. Upsell paths built in.
Customers pay for what they use. Revenue scales with usage โ not with your headcount. Every new customer improves your margins.
Your brand, your domain, your pricing. Customers see your cloud product โ not the infrastructure underneath. You control the relationship.
Revenue grows faster than costs. Your tenth customer costs almost nothing extra to serve. Your fiftieth improves your margins. That's a platform business โ not a services business.
Config and execution are separated. That's the design principle that makes it secure and scalable.
Configuration Layer โ KCP
Tenant definitions ยท Service policies ยท Identity (Keycloak) ยท Desired state for all clusters. End users interact here โ never with infrastructure directly.
Outbound sync only โ clusters connect in, not the other way around
Execution Layer โ OpenShift
Cluster A
MTOCluster B
MTOCluster N
MTOClusters enforce rules locally. Not routable to each other. Compromise of one cluster doesn't reach the others.
The path is shorter than you think.
OCP, Virtualization, Data Foundation. The foundation. If you have it โ you're further than you think.
Runs on your OpenShift cluster. Adds the commercial layer โ tenancy, metering, portal, catalog.
What do you want to sell? VMs? Clusters? Databases? Publish them. Customers can provision immediately.
Basic, Standard, Enterprise. Define quotas, SLAs, and prices. Consumption-based or subscription โ your choice.
Your brand. Your portal. Your cloud. Go live and start onboarding customers โ without adding headcount.
Stakater Cloud is the reference implementation. We built this for ourselves first.
Launched Stakater Cloud โ managed OpenShift with Cloud Orchestrator as the commercial layer. Paying customers from day one.
Every capability in this deck runs in production on our own platform โ not a demo environment.
We productized the commercial layer so other CSPs and MSPs can run the same model โ without building it from scratch.
Stakater
โ Red Hat Certified Multi-Tenant Operator
โ Master Services Agreement โ Sweden
โ Reloader โ 24B+ downloads, 9.9k GitHub stars
โ Global team โ 8 countries
Red Hat OpenShift + Stakater Cloud Orchestrator.
The complete stack โ infrastructure and commercial layer โ ready to go.
stakater.com