[EPIC] SCS PaaS track

In order to further develop SCS, we want to introduce a standardized Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) track. During the first workshop, we worked out two different user stories that define possible needs of PaaS customers.

However, before we can begin developing a PaaS track, we need to agree on a single definition of what PaaS means in the context of SCS. This epic is intended to serve as a central location to develop a common PaaS definition based on the work from the workshop. In addition, subtasks for the further development will be recorded here.

The minutes of the first SCS PaaS workshop can be found here: https://input.scs.community/s/bB09rAl0mT

Agreements from the workshop

• Certifiable PaaS: Certifications based on PaaS should be possible.
• Independent PaaS: The existing IaaS or KaaS tracks should not be a dependency for a PaaS track. Implementations should be stackable.
• Modular PaaS: There should be many granular PaaS standards as some kind of sovereign Lego blocks that can be bundled in scopes for certification.
  • One could think towards a model like with the integrator certification (e.g. various tiers bundling a specific (sub)set of standards/services).
• No automated migration: The migration of applications/workloads between clouds in an automated way seems not feasible at this stage. Several providers think it's not possible to do that in a fully automatic way (which would also include data migration and so on), which is why we have agreed on standardized interoperability ("migrate in the same way").

User stories worked out in the workshop

1. Minimal user story

As a PaaS customer,
I want to be able to order services like a database or a cache via an API and not have to worry about the operations of these services.

2. Extended user story

In order to be compatible and have interchangeability between providers,
As a PaaS customer,
I want to be able to migrate my application from one SCS PaaS cloud to another SCS PaaS cloud in the same way.

Open definition of "PaaS"

Looking at the user stories, there are currently different interpretations of PaaS. We have to agree on one. Or maybe there are even more options?

• Managed Services: Provisioning of cloud-managed services like Database-as-a-Service, Monitoring-as-a-Service, Logging-as-a-Service and so on similar to traditional hyperscaler offerings.
• Developer platform: A code-centric platform where developers can "push code" without any awareness of underlying infrastructure similar to Cloud Foundry or Heroku.

EDIT 2026-07-16: Added a third option derived from this comment.

• Self-hosting platform: A platform that provides highly performant, standardized infrastructure (like fast local storage or optimized networking) and a baseline documentation with deployment patterns and blueprints to self-host and manage own services for maximum sovereignty.