At SNCF, rather than sovereignty, they prefer the term strategic autonomy: it signals more of an action‑oriented dynamic… and it’s less “royalist.”
Thomas Comtet clarified this terminology last week during an express keynote at KubeCon Europe. In the background was a project in which he participates as head of the containerization/cloud‑native services team… and which earned his company a CNCF Community Award. Specifically, the “Top End User” prize.
OpenStack, Talos Linux, and Cluster API
Kubernetes today underpins about 30% of SNCF’s applications, with 25% on VM/bare metal and 45% in managed services.
This portfolio runs predominantly (70%) on Azure and AWS, toward which a migration had begun in 2018.
To achieve the famed “strategic autonomy,” SNCF sought to reproduce the public cloud experience in its data center. The first on‑prem clusters, created in 2020, were indeed functional but involved manual processes and custom tooling. Delivering one could take up to a month, in addition to ongoing maintenance challenges and the lack of essential features such as automatic pod scaling.
In 2023, the railway group started from zero, backed by a cloud‑native stack: OpenStack, Talos Linux, Cilium, Kyverno… and Cluster API. The latter was the keystone of the edifice. Besides eliminating configuration drift, it enabled node autoscaling via its OpenStack provider.
The GitOps implementation performed in the public cloud—based on Argo CD—was replicated on‑prem. ORAS has been integrated to manage the providers of the Cluster API as OCI artifacts. It is now possible to provision a cluster in 30 minutes, according to SNCF, which also highlights automated maintenance (monthly updates). It aims to develop deeper integrations with CNCF and OpenInfra ecosystems, while integrating KCP and Crossplane to simplify infrastructure consumption.
Further reading:
The CNCF projects most deployed in production
KubeCon 2026: From Istio to Dapr, as an entire ecosystem talks about AI
Too much IaaS, not enough managed services: DINUM suggests a change in trajectory
Germany sketches a national “sovereign” stack: what’s inside
Digital sovereignty: evaluation tools are pouring in
