By Canadian here, we mean sovereign. Canadian owned, located, and with no foreign ownership. For the reasoning behind that stricter bar — why a Canadian region of a US-owned cloud isn't Canadian hosting — see our sovereignty page; for the wider ecosystem inventory, the State of Canadian Cloud Infrastructure post. Here's what an actual Canadian-owned stack looks like, layer by layer, with real vendors.
Compute, DB, storage, analytics
Firstly, yes, Canner covers this whole block — Montreal-based, Canadian-owned, managed Postgres per project, object storage, analytics, scheduled jobs and SQL. But also KeepSec, Québec-based and Canadian-owned, for dedicated hardware or a regulated deployment. ThinkOn, for sovereign cloud.
DNS
EasyDNS, based in Toronto, is a genuine Canadian-owned DNS provider since the '90s.
Payments
Moneris is a real Canadian-owned processor. You'll feel a slight trade-off in developer ergonomics, but Moneris opens up real, meaningful revenue that stays in Canada and doesn't go to some credit card company in Delaware.
Cakemail is a real alternative to SendGrid or Resend. In terms of deliverability, we see identical behaviour, but Canner doesn't send a lot of sales or transactional mail, so take this with a grain of salt.
Where it's thin
CDN doesn't exist. This is a hardware problem and a trust problem. There was no reason to build our own because we paid the US for theirs. CDN hardware and infrastructure is extremely low margin.
Most of the rest falls to open source: CI/CD, Grafana, Prometheus, Gitea — all can run on Canadian infrastructure.
For AI compute, it looks like Canner is one of few. Most models are limited to open source or BYO.
In short, the Canadian stack falls short at the very top of the software pipeline, and the very bottom of the hardware. It's not actually a thin market, but it's held between the thumb and finger of the American market.