devopsmigrationsecurity

How to Migrate Sensitive Workloads to a Sovereign Cloud Without Breaking CI/CD

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2026-01-26

12 min read

Practical step-by-step plan for DevOps teams to move pipelines, secrets and observability into a sovereign cloud without breaking automation.

Don't break the delivery pipeline while meeting sovereignty: a practical migration plan for 2026

Pain point: You need to move sensitive workloads into a sovereign cloud to meet data-residency and legal controls, but you can't afford to tear down CI/CD, leak secrets, or blind observability. This guide gives DevOps teams a tested, step-by-step approach to migrate pipelines, secrets management, and observability into a sovereign cloud while preserving automated delivery and minimizing risk.

Why sovereign clouds matter in 2026 — and what changed recently

Regulators and enterprises accelerated sovereign cloud adoption through late 2024–2025 and into 2026. Major providers launched regionally isolated offerings (for example, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud announced in Jan 2026), and customers now demand:

Physical and logical separation of compute and control planes
Customer-held keys and legal assurances for access and egress
Vendor-neutral telemetry and local observability retention

"AWS has launched the AWS European Sovereign Cloud ... designed to help customers meet the EU’s sovereignty requirements." — Jan 2026 announcement

Those changes affect every layer of delivery: where builds run, where secrets are stored, where telemetry lands, and how network egress is controlled. The goal of this guide is to give an actionable migration path that preserves CI/CD automation and maintains security and compliance controls.

High-level migration strategy (inverted-pyramid summary)

Do this in order: Assess → Design → Build a sovereign control plane → Migrate infra state and registries → Migrate CI/CD runners and pipelines → Migrate secrets and access → Migrate observability → Validate and cut over. Each stage includes concrete steps, tools, and checks to avoid breaking automation.

Key principles

Declarative first: Recreate workloads with Terraform/Helm/GitOps rather than relying on live cluster snapshots.
Keep secrets local: Never store permanent secrets in pipeline logs; prefer OIDC/workload identity and ephemeral credentials.
Self-hosted control plane components: CI runners, Terraform execution, and observability collectors must run inside the sovereign boundary.
Test incrementally: Use canary pipelines and shadow telemetry before full cutover.

Step-by-step migration plan

1) Assess and map (1–2 weeks)

Objective: know every artifact, secret, and telemetry endpoint you must move.

Inventory pipeline components: Git repositories, CI systems (GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins), runners, build images, and artifacts.
Map secrets stores and flows: identify where secrets are stored (Vault, cloud KMS, pipeline variables). Trace how they flow to build agents and clusters.
Catalog telemetry: metrics (Prometheus), traces (OpenTelemetry), logs (Fluentd/Loki), and retention/aggregation points.
Network mapping: list egress endpoints, third-party SaaS (code scanning, dependency services), and necessary IP allowlists.

Deliverable: a master migration spreadsheet with owners and risk scores.

2) Design the sovereign control plane (1–3 weeks)

Objective: define where CI/CD and core services will run inside the sovereign cloud.

Decide Git hosting: options include GitHub Enterprise Server in-region, self-hosted GitLab, or a private Gitea. Choose one that supports required integrations and residency guarantees.
Choose CI runtime model: self-hosted runners or managed runners certified for the sovereign region. For tight sovereignty, prefer self-hosted runners in private subnets.
Define state storage: Terraform remote state must use a storage service inside the sovereign boundary (e.g., in-region S3-equivalent). Ensure locking (DynamoDB-style or database-based) stays local.
Plan container registry strategy: host an in-region registry (ECR/GCR-equivalent) and consider a pull-through cache for images that originate from public registries to minimize egress and speed pulls.
Design secrets and KMS: choose a secrets backend that can be fully controlled (HashiCorp Vault with auto-unseal via in-region KMS, or the provider's secrets service when it provides sovereign guarantees).
Observability topology: run OpenTelemetry Collector, Prometheus, and log ingesters inside the sovereign cloud. Choose storage (OpenSearch, managed observability service in-region) for long-term retention.

3) Build foundational infrastructure (2–4 weeks)

Objective: create the networking, IAM, and services that will host CI/CD and state.

Provision VPCs and egress controls: centralize egress through controlled NAT gateways or a transit VPC. Implement proxying and egress filtering to prevent accidental data exfiltration.
Provision identity and trust: configure IAM roles, OIDC providers, and workload identity federation. OIDC avoids long-lived cloud keys in pipelines.
Set up remote state: create Terraform buckets or equivalent inside the sovereign cloud, with encryption keys under your control.
Deploy container registry and replication rules: create a registry namespace for your organization and test push/pull from internal build agents.
Deploy an initial Kubernetes cluster or managed K8s offering in the sovereign region. Keep it minimal; you'll later use GitOps to deploy workloads.

4) Migrate pipeline execution (CI runners) without breaking pipelines (2–6 weeks)

Objective: run your existing CI pipelines inside the sovereign cloud with zero or minimal change.

Provision self-hosted runners inside private subnets (or configure provider-managed sovereign runners if available). Use autoscaling groups or ephemeral runner-manager solutions so runners are ephemeral and stateless.
Implement secure bootstrap: runners should obtain short-lived credentials via OIDC and authenticate to in-region services without persistent secrets. Example: configure GitHub Actions runners or GitLab Runners to acquire tokens via OIDC federation to the cloud IAM.
Mirror build caches and artifact stores: configure build caches (Maven, npm, pip) and artifact repositories (Nexus, Artifactory) in-region and update pipelines to use these endpoints. This reduces cross-region pulls and speeds builds.
Test pipelines in a mirrored Git repo or branch. Monitor for failures caused by DNS, egress blocks, or missing endpoints.
Run canary releases: run non-production pipelines fully in-region first, then promote to production.

Tip: Use a runner management system (for example, GitHub Actions Runner Controller or self-hosted GitLab Runners on Kubernetes) to make runners easy to scale and enforce consistent security baseline.

5) Move secrets safely (1–3 weeks, ongoing hardening)

Objective: ensure secrets and keys remain inside the sovereign boundary and use ephemeral credentials where possible.

Choose a secrets model:
- Vault-first: deploy HashiCorp Vault with storage and auto-unseal in-region. Use Transit for encryption and dynamic secrets for databases and cloud APIs.
- Cloud KMS + Secret Service: use the provider's secret manager only if it meets your legal/data residency requirements.
Migrate secrets without exposure: extract secrets in an offline environment, import into Vault/Secrets Manager, then rotate keys and revoke previous credentials. Avoid exporting secrets into plaintext files or pipeline variables.
Use short-lived credentials and OIDC/workload identity for build agents and pods. Replace long-lived tokens with ephemeral ones issued by Vault or the cloud IAM.
For Kubernetes, use solutions that avoid storing raw secrets in Git: Sealed Secrets, Mozilla SOPS + KMS, or External Secrets Operator that pulls secrets at runtime from Vault/Secrets Manager.
Standardize secret access: create roles and policies that grant minimal privileges and audit every access with immutable logs stored in-region.

6) Migrate observability without losing fidelity (2–4 weeks)

Objective: keep metrics, traces, and logs flowing into an in-region observability stack so alerting and SLOs remain intact.

Deploy OpenTelemetry Collector inside the sovereign network as a central gateway. Configure service and agent collectors to send telemetry to local endpoints only.
Reconfigure exporters: update application and SDK exporters to point to the in-region collector. Do not allow telemetry to be exported to global SaaS endpoints unless contractually allowed.
Data hygiene: add preprocessing to redact PII and reduce cardinality before long-term storage. Use server-side sampling to avoid unnecessary egress and cost.
Storage and search: deploy in-region metric stores (Prometheus remote-write receiver), trace storage (Tempo or Jaeger in-region), and log store (OpenSearch or Loki) with appropriate retention and encryption.
Recreate alerting and dashboards: export existing Grafana dashboards and alert rules, import them into the sovereign Grafana and point alerts to in-region incident channels (pager, ticketing). Validate that alerting thresholds remain meaningful after latency or sampling changes.

In 2026, OpenTelemetry is the defacto telemetry layer — use it to decouple your instrumentation from vendor endpoints.

7) Migrate infrastructure as code and state safely (1–3 weeks)

Objective: move Terraform, Helm, and other declarative artifacts so your infra can be reconstituted in-region.

Move remote state: copy Terraform state files into the sovereign remote state store with encryption keys under your control. Use state locking to avoid concurrency issues.
Adopt a remote execution model: run Terraform applies from a controller inside the sovereign cloud (self-hosted Terraform Enterprise or Atlantis) to avoid sending plan/apply data outside the boundary.
Re-run infrastructure provisioning from declarative configs rather than cloning VMs. Recreate clusters and resources using Terraform and Helm in the sovereign region to maintain idempotency.

8) Network egress controls and cost management

Network egress is both a legal and cost concern. Take these actions:

Create a designated egress VPC with centralized NATs and proxies to control which external services can be contacted.
Use private endpoints and VPC peering to connect to cloud-managed services without crossing public networks.
Implement egress monitoring and alerts for unusual external connections. Track egress costs by project and enforce budgets.
Where external SaaS is required (scanners, SaaS APM), use contractual data processing agreements and certified sovereign offerings if available.

9) Validate, test, and cut over (2–6 weeks)

Objective: prove parity and safely switch production traffic.

Functional parity tests: run full CI pipelines in the sovereign environment and validate build artifacts, image signatures, and deployment hooks.
Observability parity: compare key SLOs and alert fidelity between old and new stacks using historical baselines. Check for missing traces or logs.
Security & compliance: run vulnerability scans, proof of key residency, and audit log exports. Validate KMS key policies and access logs.
Canary cutover: route a small percentage of production traffic or run a blue-green cutover. Keep rollback plan and ensure runbooks are updated.

Tooling patterns and concrete recommendations

CI/CD and pipeline migration

GitHub Actions: use self-hosted runners inside the sovereign cloud or GitHub Enterprise Server hosted in-region. Use OIDC federation for cloud access.
GitLab CI: run Runners in Kubernetes in-region; use Auto DevOps templates and protected variables scoped to in-region projects.
Jenkins: run controllers and agents inside the sovereign cloud. Prefer ephemeral agents spun from Kubernetes to avoid long-lived credentials.

Secrets management

HashiCorp Vault with auto-unseal against in-region KMS — recommended for maximum control.
SOPS + KMS for Git-stored encrypted secrets; use strict key policies and rotate keys on import.
External Secrets Operator to inject secrets into Kubernetes from Vault or Secrets Manager securely at runtime.

Observability

OpenTelemetry Collector as an in-region gateway.
Prometheus remote_write to in-region long-term store and Grafana hosted inside the sovereign cloud for dashboards and alerting.
Prefer Tempo/OpenSearch/Loki in-region for traces/logs with index encryption and access controls.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

Rushing state migration: copying Terraform state without validation leads to drift and resource collisions. Always plan a dry-run and validate in a staging account.
Leaving runners with broad network access: self-hosted runners must be constrained by IAM and network policies to avoid data exfiltration.
Not rotating secrets: migrate secrets and immediately rotate credentials to invalidate old copies.
Blind observability cutover: failing to compare SLOs before/after causes missed alerts. Run parallel telemetry collection during testing.

2026 trends and future-proofing your migration

As of 2026, three trends matter for sovereign migrations:

Vendor-certified sovereign services: major cloud vendors now offer regionally isolated clouds with contractual sovereignty commitments — leverage these where they meet compliance.
Telemetry standardization: OpenTelemetry is mature; build instrumentation that can switch exporters without code changes.
Confidential computing and MPC: using TEEs and multi-party compute is becoming mainstream for highly sensitive workloads — design for eventual integration if encryption-in-use is required.

Design your migration so components (secrets, telemetry, builds) are replaceable: favor abstractions (Vault, OpenTelemetry, GitOps) over provider-locked services when lock-in is a concern.

Checklist before you flip production

All CI runners operate inside the sovereign boundary and use ephemeral credentials.
Terraform remote state and locking are in-region with verified permissions.
Secrets are stored in-region and rotated; no plaintext export remains.
Telemetry collectors and storage are in-region; alerting targets are reachable.
Network egress is controlled and monitored; egress costs estimated and budgets set.
Runbooks and rollback plans are documented and practiced.

Case study: small bank migrates pipelines to an EU sovereign cloud (brief)

In late 2025 a regional bank needed to move payment-processing workloads into an EU sovereign cloud. They followed this approach:

Built an in-region GitLab and GitLab Runners on Kubernetes with OIDC federation to the cloud IAM.
Deployed HashiCorp Vault with auto-unseal using the provider's sovereign KMS and rotated all DB credentials during import.
Created an OpenTelemetry pipeline that filtered PII server-side before storing traces and metrics in-region.
Executed a two-week canary by routing 5% of traffic to the new cluster and validated SLOs before full cutover.

Result: zero production incidents from deployment automation, full audit trail for regulators, and predictable egress costs.

Actionable takeaways

Build your sovereign control plane before migrating pipelines — runners and state must live in-region.
Replace long-lived credentials with OIDC and ephemeral secrets to prevent leaks in CI logs.
Use GitOps + Terraform executed from inside the sovereign boundary for repeatable provisioning.
Migrate observability collectors and storage first to maintain SLO continuity during the cutover.

Next steps and call-to-action

Ready to move? Start with an assessment scan and a 2-week pilot that migrates a non-critical pipeline and its telemetry into your chosen sovereign region. Use the checklist above to validate the pilot and iterate.

Host-Server.Cloud offer: If you want a hands-on partner, our migration playbooks and engineering teams have executed sovereign CI/CD migrations for finance and government customers in 2025–2026. Contact us for a migration readiness review and pilot plan tailored to your environment.

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