Deployment, licensing, and the trust model
§4 of 4 · ~3 min read
Three deployment tiers
Three deployment options are available to both data space operators and participants.
| Tier | What it is | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Managed shared | Kaphera-operated European cloud infrastructure with completely isolated resources, priced per data space participation per month. | SMEs and mid-tier suppliers who need data space participation at a fraction of self-hosting cost. The most economical option. |
| Fully dedicated | A set of isolated, dedicated instances, billed per resource used. | Mid-market enterprises managing multiple participations, or with stronger resource and isolation requirements. |
| Enterprise | Custom infrastructure or compliance arrangements. | Organisations with specific procurement, audit, or sovereignty constraints that the standard tiers do not cover. |
Bring-your-own-cloud, where Kaphera manages the operators on the client’s own infrastructure, is the next major capability after GA. Compute-to-data and the application layer come later.
Explicitly out of scope for the 1 October 2026 release: BYOC, compute-to-data, the application layer, and connector profiles beyond MDS and Tractus-X.
Four licence buckets
The platform’s open-source and source-available licensing strategy is deliberate and structural. Four buckets, each with a clear role.
| Component | Licence | What it allows |
|---|---|---|
| EDC Operator, EDC Enablement Operator | Apache 2.0 | Use, run, modify, redistribute. The most permissive licence; the reference implementation for the EDC ecosystem. |
| Digital Twin Registry, DSP Data Plane | GPL | Use and run freely; if you distribute modifications, they stay open. Copyleft preserves the community implementation. |
| Cloud Operator, Cloud Server, Cloud Console | Source-available — Elastic | Read, audit, run internally without restriction. Offering it as a commercial managed service to third parties requires a licence agreement with Kaphera. |
| Managed Server, Managed Console | Source-available — proprietary | Kaphera’s commercial SaaS differentiation. The code is readable and auditable; commercial use is exclusive to Kaphera and licensed white-label partners. |
kaphera CLI, Terraform provider, Terraform modules | Apache 2.0 | Use, run, modify, redistribute. |
Open source where it should be (the operators that move data, the registry that makes Catena-X work), source-available where it has to be (the platform that runs the operations and would otherwise be forkable into a competing managed service), commercial only at the layer where Kaphera earns its operations expertise. The commercial moat is the operations, not the code.
The Krypton track record
Kaphera Cloud is not a roadmap. The MDS connector profile has been running on the predecessor platform (Krypton) since the soft launch earlier in 2026, now serving over 150 active connectors across Mobility Data Space participants. Tractus-X GA on 1 October 2026 is the platform’s first full public release, but it is backed by that production track record. Krypton goes dark when Kaphera Cloud has fully absorbed it; the migration is deliberate rather than rushed, with a parallel-run window that protects MDS continuity.
What this means for you
If you want to participate, the three managed tiers cover the range from “smallest tier-3 supplier with no IT” to “OEM running a dedicated stack with custom compliance”. Pricing scales with the size of your need.
If you want to inspect or run the stack yourself, the operators and the registry are open. Apache 2.0 for the EDC operators, GPL for the registry and data plane: all three are fork-and-go.
If you want to operate this commercially under your own brand (the white-label path), the source-available platform layer is licensable. The commercial relationship covers the parts that are not commodity.
The same platform supports all four shapes. Picking a tier is an operations choice, not a product choice; the underlying personas and components are the same across them.
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