Migration FAQ
The SWITCHkaas service is being replaced by the new Switch Cloud Kubernetes (SCK) service. Switch Cloud Kubernetes has been in production since 11.03.2025 and has become generally available (GA) on 16.09.2025. Thus we now kindly ask you to migrate your Kubernetes workloads to a new cluster on the new service.
If you already have a Switch Cloud contract, you can enable SCK for your project(s) in the Switch Cloud Portal yourself. Otherwise, get in touch with your usual Switch community account manager or hello@switch.ch.
SWITCHkaas will be shut down on 30.09.2026, please complete your migration before that date. The service will remain fully operational and supported until then. However, if all our customers complete their migrations ahead of the stated date, we may decomission unused regions earlier.
Both services are powered by the Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform (KKP) and running on OpenStack (SWITCHengines / Switch Cloud Compute). You will immediately be familiar with everything, as we kept SWITCHkaas up to date with almost all changes as we developed Switch Cloud Kubernetes. However, the underlying stack is more modern and more powerful, which you should notice immediately, if your workloads are resource hungry. Furthermore, you now have full access to the infrastructure components of your clusters on OpenStack, which opens up new possibilities for advanced users, such as manually managing the security groups.
Unfortunately, we cannot migrate your Kubernetes clusters from SWITCHkaas to Switch Cloud Kubernetes, nor can we migrate your workloads from an old cluster to a new one.
The primary reason is that there is no seamless way to perform such a migration - for example, all IPs will change. Furthermore, most workloads need tailored migration steps and a generic approach would be insufficient in most cases and could even lead to major problems.
Therefore, you will need to perform the migration yourself. If you’re already using best practices and modern methodologies to manage your workloads - e.g. Helm charts, infrastructure as code (IaC), GitOps or operators - and have proper disaster recovery procedures in place for your stateful data, this should be relatively straightforward. If not, we strongly recommend taking this opportunity to implement them in preparation.
To transfer large amounts of data, we recommend using Switch Cloud S3 (SCS3). Check out the SCS3 docs for more information.
We’re happy to provide the usual level of support for problems with SWITCHkaas (kaas-support@switch.ch) and Switch Cloud Kubernetes (cloud-support@switch.ch). However, we do not have the capacity to assist with questions related to your workloads through our support channels, unless the question is specific to our infrastructure.
That said, we can offer paid consultancy projects if you require tailored assistance. If you are interested in consultancy, please contact your usual Switch community account manager or hello@switch.ch.