If your team builds for customers in the UK and Europe, where your platform runs is increasingly part of what you sell. Your customers ask where their data lives, who can reach it, and what it will cost to grow. I am delighted to say that Sakura Sky is now an UpCloud partner, which means we can answer those questions with a European provider and a single contract.
For a long time, when a customer asked us for a European option, the answer was a European region of a hyperscaler. Those regions work well, and we will keep building on them. What I have wanted is a European provider we could recommend with the same conviction, with flat pricing and in-house engineers behind its support. UpCloud is that provider for us. From today we resell UpCloud, and our teams are ready to design, build, and run platforms on it for organisations across the UK and the Benelux.
Why UpCloud
UpCloud was formed in 2011 and is headquartered in Helsinki (UpCloud, 2026a). UpCloud’s legal team states that all of its European data centres are operated by the Finnish parent company, UpCloud Oy, under the relevant Finnish and EU member state laws, and that the group’s US subsidiary has no control over customer account information or over data held by the parent outside the US, and so cannot be compelled to disclose it under the US CLOUD Act (UpCloud Legal Team, 2026). Each organisation will want its own advice, but for many teams that makes UpCloud a practical step towards sovereign cloud.
UpCloud offers a 99.999% uptime SLA, holds ISO 27001 certification, and describes its infrastructure as GDPR-compliant. Support is 24/7 and run by UpCloud’s own people, and UpCloud quotes under 40 seconds to reach a human expert (UpCloud, 2026b). It runs fifteen data centres, ten of them in Europe, including London and Amsterdam (UpCloud, 2026c), which puts infrastructure close to the customers we work with most.
Here is what UpCloud offers that we think matters most, and what we will be testing as we build:
- Pricing you can plan around. Flat-rate pricing (UpCloud, 2026b), with outbound transfer included under UpCloud’s Fair Transfer Policy: the allowance scales with your cloud spend. There are no excess fees by default; if you go over, UpCloud may limit bandwidth for the rest of the month, or you can opt in to metered transfer above the allowance (UpCloud, 2026d). That lets data-heavy products treat egress as a planned line in the budget.
- Fast storage and fast starts. Premium plans include UpCloud’s MaxIOPS block storage by default, which UpCloud lists at 100k IOPS (UpCloud, 2026j), and UpCloud says new servers are running in under 45 seconds (UpCloud, 2026b). We will test both in our open benchmarks.
- Managed services where you need them. Managed Kubernetes is available in every UpCloud location, with a free development tier and a highly available production tier (UpCloud, 2026e; UpCloud, 2026f). Managed Databases for PostgreSQL run in every location (UpCloud, 2026g), with the pgvector extension available for retrieval workloads (Piwosz, 2026), and UpCloud describes Managed Object Storage as fully compatible with the S3 API (UpCloud, 2026h).
- GPUs for open models. GPU Servers with NVIDIA L4, L40S, RTX PRO 6000, H100, and B200 cards, currently offered from Helsinki (UpCloud, 2026i), give us a European home for running open-weight models on dedicated GPUs.
- Built to stay portable. UpCloud describes its pricing as open and reversible (UpCloud, 2026b), which matches how we build: infrastructure as code on open interfaces, so you can move if your needs change.
What this brings our customers
Sakura Sky is headquartered in Amsterdam, so this is a European partnership on both sides. Where we resell UpCloud, the platform and our engineering come under one contract and one monthly bill. You work with a team that knows your platform well, with UpCloud’s own support team behind the infrastructure. On UpCloud, compute and managed databases can run in London or Amsterdam (UpCloud, 2026c), and object storage runs in Helsinki, Stockholm, or Frankfurt (UpCloud, 2026h), so you can tell your customers or your regulator where each part of your data lives.
What we are launching
Alongside the partnership, we are introducing four services built on UpCloud:
- European Landing Zone. An UpCloud foundation delivered as code, covering account and sub-account structure, networking, access control, security baselines, and observability, so your first production workloads go live on a foundation that is already reviewed and documented.
- Managed European Platform. Your platform on UpCloud, run by us: Kubernetes, managed databases, object storage, monitoring, patching, and cost management, with the same operating discipline our Managed Services customers already rely on.
- Managed Open Models. Open-weight models chosen for your workload and served on dedicated GPU capacity in UpCloud’s Helsinki data centre (UpCloud, 2026i), with the retrieval layer, gateway, spend controls, and upgrades run by us. By default, inference runs on GPU capacity in Finland, inside your environment, and prompts are not sent to a third-party model API.
- Exit Readiness Assessment. A practical review of how portable your workloads are across providers, wherever you run today, with a plan to make future moves simpler and cheaper.
Our Professional Services teams can also work alongside your engineers on migrations, architecture, and platform engineering on UpCloud.
Where UpCloud works well
If your cloud bill is hard to forecast, data residency and third-party risk keep coming up in your GDPR, NIS2, or DORA work, or your team spends more time running Kubernetes than building on it, UpCloud is worth a look. These are the workloads we expect to bring to it most often:
- Data and AI. GPU servers in Helsinki and fast storage for training and inference, in a European location you can name.
- Backup and disaster recovery. Off-site copies and a standby environment in another European country, on compute that is affordable to keep warm.
- Regulated industries and the public sector. Fintech, healthtech, and public sector services that need European jurisdiction and an environment they can audit.
- A second cloud alongside a hyperscaler. A European home for the workloads that have to stay in-region, next to an existing AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure estate.
- Moving off VMware or on-premises. Lift-and-shift where that is the right first step, or modernisation onto Kubernetes and managed services where the business case supports it.
Sharing what we learn
We will be publishing a good deal of engineering work on UpCloud over the coming months: build-along guides, a series on running open models in production, field notes from migrations, and cloud benchmarks with an open methodology and harness that anyone can rerun. We will publish the results and the raw data together, so you can check our working.
Come and meet us
We are starting user groups in the Netherlands and the UK for people running, or thinking about running, workloads on UpCloud. Both groups will meet through Meetup, and we will announce the first sessions here on the blog. We are also planning monthly online office hours, where you can bring an architecture or a migration plan and talk it through with our engineers.
My thanks to the UpCloud team for the work they have put into getting us here. If you are weighing up European cloud for your next platform, or wondering whether it suits what you run today, I would be glad to talk.
Disclosure: Sakura Sky is an UpCloud reseller and partner. Our engineering series and benchmarks are written independently: UpCloud does not pay for or direct them, and does not review or approve them before publication. Managed Open Models and the other services named here are delivered by Sakura Sky.
References
Piwosz, P., 2026. Installing pgvector on UpCloud Managed PostgreSQL. UpCloud. Available at: https://upcloud.com/resources/tutorials/installing-pgvector-upcloud-managed-postgresql/ [Accessed 12 October 2026].
UpCloud, 2026a. About UpCloud – European Cloud Provider. Available at: https://upcloud.com/about/ [Accessed 12 October 2026].
UpCloud, 2026b. Global Cloud Platform. Available at: https://upcloud.com/ [Accessed 12 October 2026].
UpCloud, 2026c. UpCloud Data Center Information. Available at: https://upcloud.com/data-centres/ [Accessed 12 October 2026].
UpCloud, 2026d. Fair Transfer Policy: Zero-cost Egress. Available at: https://upcloud.com/fair-transfer-policy [Accessed 12 October 2026].
UpCloud, 2026e. Managed Kubernetes availability. UpCloud Documentation. Available at: https://upcloud.com/docs/products/managed-kubernetes/availability/ [Accessed 12 October 2026].
UpCloud, 2026f. UpCloud Managed Kubernetes Platform. Available at: https://upcloud.com/products/managed-kubernetes/ [Accessed 12 October 2026].
UpCloud, 2026g. Managed PostgreSQL availability. UpCloud Documentation. Available at: https://upcloud.com/docs/products/managed-postgresql/availability/ [Accessed 12 October 2026].
UpCloud, 2026h. The Perfect Home For Your Data: Managed Object Storage. Available at: https://upcloud.com/products/object-storage/ [Accessed 12 October 2026].
UpCloud, 2026i. GPU Servers availability. UpCloud Documentation. Available at: https://upcloud.com/docs/products/gpu-servers/availability/ [Accessed 12 October 2026].
UpCloud, 2026j. Premium Cloud Servers. Available at: https://upcloud.com/solutions/premium-cloud-servers/ [Accessed 12 October 2026].
UpCloud Legal Team, 2026. U.S. CLOUD Act and Why Corporate Structure Matters for Data Sovereignty. UpCloud, 22 January. Available at: https://upcloud.com/blog/us-cloud-act-corporate-structure-matters-data-sovereignty/ [Accessed 12 October 2026].