T Cloud Public in 2026: an honest review for teams leaving AWS

T Cloud Public, known as Open Telekom Cloud until January 2026, is Deutsche Telekom's public cloud, run by its business-customer arm T-Systems in Bonn, with regions in Germany and the Netherlands. It offers a catalogue shaped like a hyperscaler's, a managed PostgreSQL whose synchronous standby you can put in another zone, sub-processors all in the EU, and zones that held, by the provider's account, when a fire took one Dutch zone offline for four weeks in May 2026. It is also dearer than the clouds it would replace: our production workload costs EUR 1,325.86 a month there, 122% of the AWS price. The weak points are the contract and the openness. The 99.95% availability figure is a "target" that pays no credits unless you buy an Enterprise Agreement, included support promises 4 hours to start work, status entries rarely give a cause, and nothing public since 2020 says what part Huawei, which supplied the platform's software, plays today.

This article is one of a series comparing 24 European cloud providers with AWS and Azure; the overview puts them side by side. Everything below was checked on 15 and 16 October 2026 against T Cloud Public's service description, terms, price API and status page, Deutsche Telekom's annual report and user reports, each at its source. We did not open an account or run workloads.

At a glance

What you can build

Status is general availability unless noted, from the service description of 9 October 2026; "eu-de only" means not offered in the Dutch region. The service names are the ones Huawei Cloud uses for its own services.

Missing outright: a CDN, a hosted model API like Bedrock or Azure OpenAI, an SQS-style simple queue, H200, B200 and L40S GPUs, a small bare-metal server, and any region outside Germany, the Netherlands and the closed Swiss cloud. Serverless containers are "not suitable for live environments". The Dutch region is thinner: in October 2025 it had no API Gateway, FunctionGraph, TaurusDB, GeminiDB, OpenSearch, data warehouse or ModelArts, and release notes since have added only a few services.

The APIs are native REST plus OpenStack, and "Standard OpenStack command-line tools can also be used". The community-tier Terraform provider ships about twice a month (1.37.10 on 8 October 2026) and has 64 open GitHub issues, 26 older than a year. A CLI and Python SDK extension, a Go SDK (still 0.9.9), an Ansible collection and a Crossplane provider complete the set; there is no native Pulumi package and no published OpenAPI specification. The console is English only, and since at least October 2026 the documentation sits behind an Anubis proof-of-work bot challenge: readable in a browser, not by scripts or AI tools. That is also why we could not read which S3 operations OBS leaves out.

What it costs

T Cloud Public list prices in EUR, VAT excluded, checked 15 and 16 October 2026, in eu-de at 730 hours a month. They come from the service description and from a public price API that returns all 6,099 price lines as public JSON.

Workload A, a starter setup: one VM with 2 vCPU and 4 GB, a 40 GB disk, one IPv4 address, 1 TB of egress and 100 GB of object storage.

AWS charges EUR 112.37 and Azure EUR 116.15 for the same in Frankfurt. The x1e.large.2 flavour, with no capacity guarantee, brings T Cloud Public to EUR 124.56.

Workload B, a small production system: three VMs of 4 vCPU and 16 GB with an IPv4 address each, 300 GB of SSD block storage, a load balancer, PostgreSQL with 2 vCPU, 8 GB and 100 GB as primary plus standby, 1 TB of object storage with 1 million PUT and 10 million GET requests, a Kubernetes control plane and 2 TB of egress, spread over the three eu-de zones.

With dedicated-vCPU c9.xlarge.4 instances the total is EUR 1,619.02. AWS charges EUR 985.89 on burstable t3.xlarge and EUR 1,082.61 on m7i.xlarge; Azure EUR 1,017.63 on B4s_v2 and EUR 1,091.88 on D4s_v5. Against the m7i.xlarge figure this series uses for every provider, T Cloud Public costs 122% of AWS on shared vCPUs and 150% on dedicated ones; against AWS's burstable instances, the closer match to a shared vCPU, 134%.

Two lines make most of the gap. The HA control plane is EUR 277.53 against EUR 65.13 (USD 73) on EKS and AKS Standard. And object storage requests cost the same for every type, so 10 million GETs come to EUR 47.30 where AWS charges USD 4.30. On dedicated vCPUs a third joins them: EUR 250.93 a month for each c9 instance. Most other lines are close to AWS's, the database included (EUR 292.36 with storage, against USD 320.13). The free control plane, cce.s1.small (up to 50 nodes, no HA), brings the totals to EUR 1,048.33 and EUR 1,341.49. We took s9 as shared vCPU, as the documentation describes its s2 and s3 predecessors; worker nodes are not included.

Egress and IPv4. Inbound is free. Outbound, after the free first gigabyte, a GB costs EUR 0.074489 up to 1,000 GB and 0.070351 up to 10,000 GB, falling to 0.0418 above 5,000,000 GB. A terabyte costs about EUR 74.49, against EUR 80.30 on AWS and EUR 77.62 on Azure beyond their free 100 GB. An Elastic IP costs EUR 0.0044 an hour (EUR 3.21 a month), against USD 0.005 on AWS and Azure.

Billing. The service description says compute "is based on per-second consumption"; the product page says "Elastic (hourly billing)". Flavours with local disks and dedicated hosts "are also charged in the shutdown or allocated state"; for other VMs the terms do not say. Billing is in EUR only, and new customers get EUR 250 of credit that "expires two months after conclusion of the contract". There is no hard spending cap: the FAQ calls quotas "a simple and basic tool for limiting the costs".

GPUs, per GPU-hour in eu-de: H100 SXM EUR 5.22 (one GPU), H100 NVL EUR 5.80 (two GPUs at least), A100 EUR 3.90 and L4 EUR 0.75. For the 4-GPU and 8-GPU H100 sizes, T Cloud Public's two price sources disagree: the price API says EUR 13.64 and 27.28 an hour (EUR 3.41 per GPU), the service description EUR 20.89 and 41.79 (EUR 5.22 per GPU). Both date from October 2026 and no announcement settles it; ask sales before you plan on either. AWS does not sell the H100 in Frankfurt and charges EUR 6.57 in Stockholm; Azure's H100 NVL is EUR 8.10 in Frankfurt. The only bare-metal server, c7t.28xl, costs EUR 6.99 an hour, disks extra.

Price changes. We found no increase in the last 24 months. GPU prices "were reduced in April 2026", with no figures given, and the x1e.large.2 flavour, launched on 30 June 2025 at 8.21 cents an hour, now costs 5.75 cents. Increases must be announced "at least six weeks before they become effective", and you may terminate on that date.

Reliability

What a zone is. eu-de runs in two data centres 18 km apart, in Magdeburg and Biere, with "three physically separated availability zones". The provider defines a zone no further, and two sites hosting three zones means two zones share a site; which two in eu-de was not found. The contract says "Regions consist of two physical data centers and comprise up to three availability zones". In eu-nl, the status page placed zone AZ2 in Almere and said "AZ1 & AZ3 are located in a different location (Aalsmeer)".

The database standby. RDS replicates synchronously, and "When you create primary/standby DB instances, you can select different AZs for them". Failover is automatic "within 5 minutes" and keeps the IP address; the instance "cannot be accessed during the failover". AWS puts the standby in another zone by default and states 60 to 120 seconds. Neither the database nor Kubernetes has an availability commitment.

The SLA, from the service description:

• "T Cloud Public targets a monthly platform availability of 99.95% at the service handover point", meaning "the data center's point of entry to the internet".
• It covers VMs, block storage and object storage, each separately. "In all other respects, there is no minimum availability."
• Any one excused event suffices, and the first is that the component "is available in one of the availability zones". Read as written, an outage of one zone, or two, is not downtime while a third still works. Another is that "the customer can use an alternative instance".
• Maintenance "does not have to be announced in advance" and is not downtime.
• The standard terms pay no credits, so there is no claim window and no clock for you to start. Credits come with Enterprise Agreement 1.0 Gold (EUR 5,500 a month) and Platinum, or as a EUR 1,000 option on the Enterprise Support Agreement 2.0 (base EUR 2,500). Their amounts are not published.

AWS commits to 99.99% for EC2 across two or more zones and 99.95% for Multi-AZ RDS and the EKS control plane, with credits up to 100%; Azure gives 99.99% across zones.

Status page and incidents. status.otc-service.com keeps history back to 11 October 2023 behind a public JSON API. In the 24 months from 16 October 2024 it lists 275 incidents: 47 say "false alarm", only 3 mention a cause, and none links a postmortem. Most say nothing beyond "Incident Resolved".

The fire is the one public test of the zone design. Customers were told to "migrate or fail over their workloads and data to AZ1 or AZ3", which by the provider's account stayed up, and T-Systems wrote that "the impact has been limited to a few individual services for a small number of Telekom customers". The status page says Almere "is operated for us by NorthC Datacenters"; NorthC's own page confirms the fire but names no customer. No postmortem was found, and the effect on customer data in AZ2 was not stated. The other zones did their job; and read as written, the SLA's first excusal makes four weeks without one zone no downtime at all.

Support

Included support opens cases by contact form or email, 24x7, in German and English; "The creation of new cases by telephone is not possible", and the phone line serves existing cases. Critical events are handled around the clock, everything else, quota changes included, Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 17:00 CET. The target is 4 hours to "commencement of the troubleshooting work"; resolution is "Best Effort". You must name "up to two central and qualified contacts" and "ensure 24/7 availability of the contacts".

That is more than AWS Basic (no technical cases) or Azure Basic (no response targets) include. At T Cloud Public, paid support starts at EUR 2,500:

No paid tier publishes a response or resolution time.

Getting an account

"T Cloud Public is only offered to business users in Europe", and the general terms are for customers who are "not a consumer as defined in § 13 of the German Civil Code". Which European countries qualify was not found. You order through the T-Systems eShop or sales, and the administrator receives a "Ready-for-Service email". The eShop registration could not be read by script, so what is checked at signup (VAT ID, register entry, identity) and how long activation takes are not verified. The terms provide for SEPA direct debit and card.

Default quotas "can be viewed in the self-service-portal (console) under 'My Quotas' and adjusted via the Support Center", as support requests handled on weekdays, 08:00 to 17:00 CET. The values are not published, so whether workload B, or a GPU, can be built on day one is unknown. On AWS the default of 5 vCPUs for standard instances is below workload B's 12; Azure's 20 cores per region fit on paper.

You back up your own data ("Telekom does not back up data"), and outbound mail ports 25, 465 and 587 are blocked except through the Secure Mail Gateway (100 emails a minute) or a special Elastic IP. Telekom may "deactivate the service concerned, without prior notification" when there is a risk to third parties or the infrastructure, or "reduce or block the customer's services at the customer's own expense" on suspicion of inaccurate data or a breach; charges continue, and "Any resulting downtime is not taken into account when calculating availability".

Compliance and data protection

No certificate names which services it covers; the regions can be read only from the site lists.

The data processing agreement (April 2026) replaces clause 7.8 of the Commission's standard clauses with: "The processor shall not transfer data to a third country without an adequacy decision by the EU Commission pursuant to Article 45 GDPR." Sub-processor changes come "six weeks in advance in writing", and you may object. Every listed sub-processor is a Telekom group or EU company, in Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary (operation and second-level support from Budapest), Slovakia, Romania and Spain. Huawei is not on the list. Neither is NorthC, which runs the Almere site; whether a colocation operator belongs there is a legal question we leave open.

eu-de "is provided from data centers located in Germany", eu-nl from the Netherlands. The general terms let Telekom move services outside the EU after notice, with consent deemed given if you do not object within four weeks; the data processing agreement still forbids transfers to countries without an adequacy decision.

Who controls it

On 31 December 2025 the Federal Republic of Germany held 14.1% of Deutsche Telekom AG directly and 14.2% through KfW, together 28.3%; the free float was 71.7%, including BlackRock at about 5.7% and SoftBank at about 0.4%. Telekom's annual report says the state is "no longer deemed to have control ... but rather only a significant influence". The cloud claims "More than 4,000 business customers"; its revenue and headcount are not published.

You sign with T-Systems International GmbH (HRB 55933, Frankfurt am Main). The service description and the data processing agreement name it, and so do the general terms of 27 October 2025 that the eShop attaches to a T Cloud Public order. The site footer still links an older set, dated 4 August 2025, in the name of Telekom Deutschland GmbH, Bonn (HRB 5919 Bonn); the clauses quoted in this review read the same in both.

The eu-de sites are T-Systems sites; in eu-nl, the Almere site is run by NorthC, a colocation company. The platform was built with Huawei. What each party has said:

We found no statement from Telekom or Huawei since July 2020, either way, on whether Huawei still supplies T Cloud Public, and no report of a change of supplier. Two Hacker News commenters called it "white labeled AWS" (44633075, July 2025; 41351061, August 2024). It is not: every primary source says OpenStack and Huawei, and a Telekom spokesperson denied that it uses any hyperscaler software.

Leaving

T Cloud Public has written Data Act switching terms. File a migration form at least 30 days before a 30-day transition period, and "You will receive, for example, Internet outbound traffic free of charge to carry out the switch". Without the form, the normal egress tiers apply. Leaving a reserved package early costs "half of the sum of the payments to be made" for the rest of the term. Ending the whole tenant takes four weeks' notice to the end of a month; two weeks before the end the tenant is frozen, and then "all of the customer's resources will be erased".

The core moves: VM images export as qcow, vmdk, vhd or zvhd, OBS speaks S3, and the standard database engines leave with dump tools. Kubernetes manifests export with kubectl, but node pools, storage classes and load balancer annotations are CCE-specific. The rest is harder: "It is prohibited to take keys with you" from KMS, "You cannot switch from ModelArts", public images may not be used elsewhere, and TaurusDB, GeminiDB and the data warehouse are Huawei-derived engines with their own APIs.

Services also leave you. The terms promise three months' notice for "discontinuation/modification of essential functionalities or services". Judged by the release notes, Shared SNAT got about seven weeks, SFS Common I/O about ten weeks, and WAF Classic's end of sale none; customers may have been told earlier by email. The Classic VPN shutdown, announced for June 2025, moved three times before it took effect on 31 January 2026. Two backup services reached end of life on 1 January 2026 with the warning "You will then lose access to your backups and the data will be deleted".

What users report

We searched Hacker News, Reddit and the Terraform provider's GitHub issues. Independent reports are scarce: an "Ask HN" about the platform in February 2025 drew no answers (43105212), and nothing turned up under the new name.

Weak developer experience and documentation. Users report that "the dev experience is really bad" (43459898, March 2025). A developer who runs customers on it "wouldn't necessary recommend" it, since "it has a few weaknesses in support and documentation", but adds "it does the job" (46335063, December 2025). In a German thread, one commenter's former DevOps team complained about opaque errors (Reddit) and another found it less polished than AWS (Reddit, both September 2025).

Kubernetes quirks. Two teams report charts breaking on CCE because there is no kube-dns Service, and "kubedns service missing isn't the only weird thing with OTC" (Reddit, August 2025). A Kubernetes maintainer in the thread notes that the name is not required by the specification: a compatibility quirk, not a conformance failure. CCE was not in the CNCF landscape's list of certified Kubernetes products when we checked, though we did not search the conformance repository itself.

A broad catalogue. Users list "VMs (even GPU ones), VPCs, managed databases, block storage, Logging, IAM, API Gateway, Container Engine etc." (41350577, August 2024), and the two German commenters agree.

Chosen by customers, not developers. One developer supports it because "One of our customers insisted on Telekom Cloud" (46835996, January 2026); another sees it "targeting large industrial enterprises, not your plucky webapp" (43459457, March 2025).

Huawei comes up. Whenever the platform is discussed, someone raises its origin (41350768, August 2024; 43459898, March 2025; "Ist keine EU native Cloud", it is not an EU-native cloud, on Reddit, September 2025; 46838516, January 2026). That is a perception, not a security finding.

One user sums it up as "It works but it's expensive" (41354676, August 2024), which our prices bear out. On support, one counter-report: "unlike AWS, I can get people on the phone and they are happy to talk to me" (46335063, December 2025).

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

T Cloud Public suits regulated European organisations (public sector, health, automotive, finance) that want a German contract partner, three-zone hosting in Germany, managed databases with a cross-zone standby, managed Kubernetes and audit paperwork such as C5, TISAX, ENS and KRITIS, and that will pay more than AWS list prices for it. It also suits teams already connected to Telekom's networks.

Look elsewhere if you are an individual or a company outside Europe, since you cannot sign up; if cost decides; if you need a CDN, a hosted model API, H200 or B200 GPUs, or a region outside Germany and the Netherlands; if you want SLA credits without a support contract or a polished developer experience; or if your policy excludes a Huawei-derived stack, which is a fact for you to weigh.

Sources

Checked on 15 and 16 October 2026.

Pricing

• Price API (public JSON, 6,099 lines)
• Service Specifications and Additional Terms and Conditions, rev. 9 October 2026, chapter 6 (prices) and §3.11 (support tiers)
• Elastic Cloud Server product page and first steps (starting credit)
• x flavours, 30 June 2025 and GPU price reduction, 6 May 2026
• AWS and Azure figures: AWS Price List bulk API and Azure Retail Prices API, converted at the ECB rate of 15 October 2026

Terms and SLA

• Service description, rev. 9 October 2026, §2 (regions, quotas, notice), §4 (SLA and support), §5 (customer duties), §7 (exit)
• General Terms and Conditions IT Services, T-Systems International GmbH, 27 October 2025, attached to orders in the eShop; the version of 4 August 2025 linked from the site footer names Telekom Deutschland GmbH
• Data processing agreement (ErgB-AV), April 2026
• Switching your cloud provider (Data Act)
• FAQ and personal support

Documentation

• Data centres and T Cloud Switzerland
• Regions and endpoints, Wayback copy of 1 December 2025
• RDS FAQs, Wayback copies of 22 April 2025: cross-AZ high availability and primary/standby switchover
• Release notes feed
• Terraform registry, Terraform provider on GitHub, Pulumi registry, Crossplane provider 1.0
• CNCF landscape data

Status and incidents

• Status dashboard and event API (event 978: the Almere fire)
• NorthC on the fire in Almere

Compliance

• Certifications and certifications and compliance
• ISO/IEC 27001 umbrella certificate, ISO/IEC 27017 and 27018 attestation, ENS certificate
• TISAX, 30 June 2023

Company and ownership

• Rename to T Cloud Public, 2 February 2026 and 10 years of T Cloud Public, 4 March 2026
• Deutsche Telekom Annual Report 2025: note 19, shareholders' equity and note 45, related parties
• Launch release, Deutsche Telekom and Huawei, 15 March 2016, Huawei, 31 October 2016, "The secure cloud made in Europe", 23 July 2020
• Light Reading on Telekom's new clouds and Huawei, 5 February 2026 and heise on the rename, 10 February 2026

User reports

• Hacker News: 41350577, 41350768, 41351061, 41354676 (August 2024); 43105212 (February 2025); 43459457, 43459898 (March 2025); 44633075 (July 2025); 46335063 (December 2025); 46835996, 46838516 (January 2026)
• Reddit: r/informatik thread on European cloud providers (September 2025) and r/kubernetes thread on the kube-dns Service (August 2025)