Open source has become the defining way of developing software. But how do we open-source the operation of software? The Operate First Community Cloud is a peer-to-peer mentoring environment for running software in production, as well as a community for Cloud Native SREs to share knowledge about production practices. Using the same community-building process of open source projects, but extended to ops procedures and data. Experienced SRE’s find an outlet for sharing their knowledge and new talent get’s a chance to grow into an SRE role and get their hands on cloud-native projects in a production environment. Could this be a blueprint for a sovereign cloud? We’ll discuss how opening operations can free up a cloud deployment and lead to the same independence that open source brought to software.