Copilot Project: Baden-Württemberg Government
Open-Source AI Platform for Digital Sovereignty
Project Introduction
In response to growing concerns about dependency on foreign technology companies amid the rapid advancement of AI and digitalization, the German government, along with other European nations, has taken proactive steps to establish technological sovereignty. The state of Baden-Württemberg initiated the Copilot Project as a pioneering effort to create a reference architecture for a fully open-source, self-hosted AI platform.
The primary motivation was to reduce reliance on proprietary, foreign-owned AI services while maintaining cutting-edge AI capabilities. The project aimed to demonstrate that governments could operate sophisticated AI platforms with complete control over their data, infrastructure, and AI models, ensuring compliance with European data protection regulations (GDPR) and maintaining digital sovereignty.
The resulting platform provides a ChatGPT-like user experience through OpenWebUI, while maintaining complete control over the entire technology stack, from the user interface down to the GPU-accelerated model inference layer.
Critical Requirements
Project Complexity & Challenges
Open-Source Component Integration
Integrating multiple open-source projects with different maturity levels into a cohesive platform. OpenWebUI required extensive customization, multiple authentication systems needed seamless integration, and version compatibility management was critical.
Multi-Model Management
Supporting diverse AI models from 7B to 70B+ parameters with vastly different resource requirements. Model quantization strategies (4-bit, 8-bit, FP16) created tradeoffs between quality and performance.
Security and Compliance
Meeting stringent government security requirements, GDPR compliance, and BSI guidelines. End-to-end encryption, comprehensive audit logging, RBAC with fine-grained permissions, and data residency requirements within German/EU borders.
RAG Implementation Complexity
Building reliable RAG pipelines for securely accessing government documents. Vector database optimization for large-scale collections, embedding model selection for German language, and access control integration.
Infrastructure Scalability
Designing infrastructure to scale from development to production serving thousands of concurrent users. GPU resource allocation in Kubernetes, auto-scaling for CPU and GPU workloads, and cost optimization.
Cost Tracking and Governance
Implementing comprehensive cost tracking, usage quotas, and billing mechanisms for multi-tenant government platform. Token-level cost calculation, department-level budget allocation, and API rate limiting.
Authentication and Federation
Integrating with existing government identity providers, supporting SAML and OAuth2/OIDC, eID system integration, SSO across all platform components, and role synchronization from AD/LDAP.
DevOps and GitOps Complexity
Establishing robust CI/CD pipelines with stringent change management. Managing Helm charts for dozens of microservices, GitOps workflows with ArgoCD, model versioning, and compliance scanning.
Solution Architecture & Implementation
Six-Layer Architecture
The Copilot platform consists of six primary layers working together to deliver a complete AI platform built on modularity, scalability, security-by-design, and observability principles.
Detailed Layer Implementations
Layer 1: Frontend - OpenWebUI
ChatGPT-like user experience with government customization
Government Customization
- • Complete branding with government identity standards
- • WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility compliance
- • Multi-language support (German/English)
- • Document upload with classification metadata
- • Automatic session timeout and security indicators
Features
- • Conversation management with cost tracking
- • Model selection interface with real-time status
- • RAG integration with document transparency
- • Export conversations for record-keeping
- • Horizontally scalable deployment
Layer 2: API Gateway - Kong Gateway
Central nervous system for all platform requests
Core Functions
- • Intelligent request routing
- • SSL/TLS termination
- • Load balancing across services
- • Dynamic route configuration
- • Health checking
Security
- • JWT token validation
- • Rate limiting and quotas
- • IP allowlisting/denylisting
- • Request validation
- • Circuit breaker patterns
Observability
- • Comprehensive logging
- • Prometheus metrics export
- • Distributed tracing
- • Kong Manager dashboard
- • Real-time monitoring
Layer 3: Authentication - Keycloak
Identity and access management with SSO
Core Capabilities
- ✓Single Sign-On (SSO) across all platform services
- ✓Federation with Active Directory and LDAP
- ✓Integration with Germany's eID system
- ✓SAML 2.0 and OAuth2/OIDC support
- ✓Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
RBAC System
Layer 4: LLM Gateway - LiteLLM Proxy
Intelligent model routing and cost management
Unified Model Interface
- • OpenAI-compatible API for all models
- • Automatic request translation
- • Multi-model support
- • Model switching and load balancing
Cost Tracking
- • Per-user, per-department tracking
- • Token-based cost calculation
- • Real-time cost accumulation
- • Budget alerts and quota enforcement
Usage Analytics
- • Requests per second monitoring
- • Average latency per model
- • Token consumption trends
- • Model popularity metrics
Advanced Features
- • Intelligent caching
- • Rate limiting and fair use
- • API key management
- • Admin dashboard
Layer 5: Model Serving - vLLM
GPU-accelerated inference with PagedAttention
Why vLLM?
Industry-leading performance with PagedAttention algorithm reducing GPU memory requirements by up to 24x. Same technology used by ChatGPT for serving transformer-based language models at scale.
Performance Optimizations
- • Fused CUDA kernels for reduced overhead
- • Flash Attention implementation
- • Mixed-precision computation (FP16/FP32)
- • Model quantization (GPTQ, AWQ, SmoothQuant)
- • Tensor parallelism for multi-GPU serving
Advanced Features
- • Streaming responses via SSE/WebSockets
- • Speculative decoding for faster generation
- • KV cache sharing for common prompts
- • Multi-model serving and LoRA adapters
- • Comprehensive GPU utilization monitoring
Layer 6: Data & RAG Infrastructure
Vector databases and knowledge-enhanced AI
Qdrant Vector Database
Stores document embeddings for semantic similarity search, enabling AI models to access and reason over government documents while maintaining security and access controls.
- • Multilingual embedding models (German focus)
- • Document chunking with overlap (512-1024 tokens)
- • OCR for scanned documents (Tesseract)
- • Metadata extraction and classification
- • Security clearance-based filtering
- • Department-level partitioning
- • Server-side authorization enforcement
- • Classification level restrictions (Public/Internal/Confidential/Secret)
DevOps & Infrastructure
Kubernetes Orchestration
- •Custom GPU operators for resource allocation
- •Helm charts for all microservices
- •Auto-scaling for CPU and GPU workloads
- •High availability across multiple nodes
- •Pod Security Standards enforcement
CI/CD Pipeline
- •GitOps workflows with ArgoCD
- •Automated compliance scanning (licenses, vulnerabilities)
- •Blue-green and canary deployment strategies
- •Model versioning and MLOps pipelines
- •Automated rollback procedures
Monitoring & Observability
- •Prometheus for metrics collection
- •Grafana dashboards for visualization
- •ELK Stack for log aggregation
- •Jaeger for distributed tracing
- •GPU utilization and performance tracking
Security & Compliance
- •BSI (German Federal Cybersecurity) compliance
- •GDPR data protection compliance
- •End-to-end encryption for all communications
- •Comprehensive audit logging
- •Data residency within German/EU borders
Complete Technology Stack
Frontend
API Gateway
Authentication
LLM Gateway
Model Serving
AI Models
Vector DB
Infrastructure
Monitoring
DevOps
Security
Languages
Project Impact
Established a reference architecture for government AI platforms across Europe, demonstrating that complete digital sovereignty is achievable while maintaining cutting-edge AI capabilities. The platform eliminates dependency on foreign technology companies, ensures GDPR and BSI compliance, and provides a ChatGPT-like experience with full control over data, infrastructure, and AI models—pioneering the future of sovereign AI for public sector organizations across Germany and the European Union.