Nantes, France — Clever Cloud, a European cloud provider, announces the public beta launch of Clever Kubernetes Engine (CKE) on April 27, 2026, in the afternoon. The product will be previewed at Devoxx starting April 22, where attendees will be able to test it directly at the Clever Cloud booth.

Built for production and scalability

Kubernetes has become the standard for container orchestration. Clever Cloud spent two years developing a managed, sovereign version designed to integrate naturally into the Clever Cloud ecosystem and operate with the same simplicity as the platform's other services. CKE is built to handle real production workloads, with high scalability and predictable behavior at scale.

To achieve this, Clever Cloud developed Materia etcd, a reimplementation of Kubernetes' internal consistency layer built on FoundationDB. This foundational work — invisible to the end user — is what guarantees CKE's robustness and stability in production, notably through native auto-scaling and auto-healing capabilities.

CKE integrates natively with existing Clever Cloud services — Cellar object storage (S3-compatible), managed databases, IAM as a Service, Network Groups — and remains accessible via standard industry tools: kubectl, Helm, or GitOps.

Sovereign by design

Hosted and operated in Europe by Clever Cloud on its public cloud, CKE offers organizations a concrete alternative to the Kubernetes offerings of major American platforms, without compromising on performance or legal data control. CKE can also be deployed on the customer's own on-premises infrastructure.

Access details

The public beta is open to all Clever Cloud customers from April 27, 2026, via feature activation performed by the user. Notably, some customers have already had access through a private test for over six months, allowing the product to be refined before this general release.

"Clever Cloud has long developed alternatives to Kubernetes. Our customers expressed a clear need for this technology, and we decided to build it alongside them, with the level of technical excellence and sovereignty that defines our platform." — Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud

Learn more

BSL is not an open-source license as defined by the Open Source Initiative: it restricts commercial use deemed competitive with HashiCorp's offerings. Overnight, thousands of organizations that had built their infrastructure around Terraform found themselves in uncomfortable legal uncertainty.

The response was swift. Less than a month after the announcement, a manifesto calling for a return to an open-source license had gathered 33,000 GitHub stars and the support of nearly 140 companies. HashiCorp did not budge. The fork was published in September 2023, brought into the Linux Foundation, and renamed OpenTofu. Since January 2024, it has been in stable production. Since April 2025, it has been part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Our Terraform provider is fully compatible with OpenTofu. No changes to your configurations are needed to use it.

What is OpenTofu?

OpenTofu is an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) tool, forked from the last MPL 2.0-licensed version of Terraform (1.5.x), distributed under that same Mozilla Public License 2.0. It lets you describe, provision, and manage cloud infrastructure through declarative configuration files written in HashiCorp Configuration Language.

It is developed under the governance of the Linux Foundation, with a Technical Steering Committee made up of representatives from multiple organizations — Gruntwork, Spacelift, Harness, Env0, Scalr — so that no single company can control its direction. That governance model is precisely what convinced many teams to make the switch: a guarantee that the tool will remain truly open source, regardless of how its contributors evolve commercially.

In practice, OpenTofu works with the same .tf files, the same providers, the same modules, and the same CLI workflow as Terraform — init, plan, apply, destroy. For the vast majority of teams, migrating comes down to replacing the binary.

What's the actual difference with Terraform?

The main difference is the license, and everything it implies in the long run.

Terraform is now distributed under the BSL, which restricts commercial uses that could be considered competitive with HashiCorp — a deliberately vague notion that HashiCorp (now a subsidiary of IBM) may interpret differently in the future. OpenTofu is distributed under MPL 2.0, a true open-source license with no commercial restrictions.

Beyond the license, the two projects have started to diverge technically since the fork. The most notable differences to date:<ul> <li><strong>State encryption:</strong> OpenTofu natively supports client-side encryption of state files — a feature long requested by the community that Terraform has still not implemented.

• Governance: OpenTofu is steered by a multi-organization technical committee within the Linux Foundation. Terraform is controlled by IBM via HashiCorp, with a roadmap driven by commercial priorities.
• Compatibility: OpenTofu maintains syntactic and functional compatibility with Terraform. Existing providers, modules, and configurations work without modification for the vast majority of use cases.
• The .tofu extension: OpenTofu supports this extension alongside .tf, allowing module authors to provide OpenTofu-specific variants while remaining compatible with Terraform.
• Terraform Actions: HashiCorp introduced "actions" in Terraform 1.9+, a feature that lets you trigger custom behaviors during resource lifecycle events. OpenTofu does not yet support them — this is the inherent trade-off of any fork: new proprietary Terraform features are not automatically available, and their implementation in OpenTofu depends on the technical committee's priorities.

Why teams are migrating to OpenTofu

Three reasons come up consistently.

Legal risk. The BSL prohibits using Terraform in products that could compete with HashiCorp's commercial offerings. For teams building internal platforms, cloud products, or managed services, this uncertainty is a real operational risk — especially since the definition of "competitive" belongs to HashiCorp and can evolve. On top of that, there is a less visible but equally significant reality: in the Terraform registry, open-source providers get no special visibility. Getting an "official" badge requires negotiating directly with HashiCorp — and paying for it. In the OpenTofu registry, all providers are on equal footing, regardless of the size or resources of their maintainers.

Strategic autonomy over tooling. Your infrastructure as code is the foundation of everything else. Depending on a tool controlled by a US company subject to the Cloud Act means introducing an additional dependency that many organizations would rather avoid. OpenTofu, under Linux Foundation / CNCF governance, offers continuity independent of any commercial actor.

Features Terraform doesn't ship. Native state file encryption is the most frequently cited example: requested by the community for years, implemented within months by OpenTofu. It is also a signal about how quickly community-driven governance can respond to real needs, compared to a roadmap driven by commercial interests.

Migrating from Terraform to OpenTofu

For the vast majority of teams, migration takes a matter of minutes. All you need to do is make sure the state is clean, install OpenTofu, and replace terraform with tofu in your commands.

# Make sure your state is clean before migrating terraform plan 

# → "No changes. Your infrastructure matches the configuration."

 # Install OpenTofu on macOS brew install opentofu 

# Install OpenTofu on Linux 

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -fsSL https://get.opentofu.org/install-opentofu.sh | sh 

# Resume your normal workflow 

tofu init 

tofu plan

tofu apply

Existing .tf files do not need to be modified. The OpenTofu registry mirrors all providers available on the Terraform Registry — including the Clever Cloud provider.

OpenTofu on Clever Cloud: nothing to change

Our official provider (CleverCloud/clevercloud, currently version 1.10) works identically with both Terraform and OpenTofu. The provider source, HCL syntax, and all available resources are exactly the same. A minimal example to deploy a Node.js application with a PostgreSQL database:

terraform {

  required_providers {

    clevercloud = {

      source  = "CleverCloud/clevercloud"

      version = "~> 1.10"

    }

  }

}

provider "clevercloud" {organisation}

resource "clevercloud_node" "app" {

  name       = "mon-app-node"

  region     = "par"

  min_flavor = "XS"

  max_flavor = "M"

}

resource "clevercloud_postgresql" "db" {

  name   = "ma-base-postgres"

  region = "par"

  plan   = "dev"

}

tofu init

tofu plan

tofu apply

The OpenTofu + Clever Cloud combination is a fully sovereign IaC stack: open-source tooling under Linux Foundation / CNCF governance, infrastructure hosted in our own data centers in France, outside the reach of the US Cloud Act. It is the choice increasingly made by teams who want full control over their entire toolchain — not just their data.

The Clever Cloud provider is available on the Terraform Registry and fully open source on GitHub.

Q&A

Is OpenTofu compatible with my existing Terraform configurations?

For the vast majority of use cases, yes. OpenTofu maintains syntactic and functional compatibility with Terraform. Existing .tf files, providers, and modules work without modification. Testing in a non-production environment before switching critical workloads is recommended.

Is OpenTofu production-ready? 

Yes. The first stable version was released in January 2024. The project has since surpassed 10 million downloads and is used in production by organizations of all sizes, including Fortune 500 companies. Its integration into the CNCF in April 2025 reinforced its credibility for enterprise environments.

What is the open-source alternative to Terraform? 

OpenTofu is the primary open-source alternative to Terraform. Distributed under MPL 2.0, maintained by the Linux Foundation, and a CNCF member, it is the direct continuation of Terraform in its original open-source state.

Is the Clever Cloud Terraform provider compatible with OpenTofu? 

Yes, with no configuration changes required. Our official provider (CleverCloud/clevercloud) works identically with both Terraform and OpenTofu.

How does OpenTofu work? 

In the same way as Terraform: you describe the target state of your infrastructure in HCL, OpenTofu computes the necessary changes (tofu plan) and applies them (tofu apply). It manages dependencies between resources, the state, and the full lifecycle of each resource. This is also where IBM's acquisition of HashiCorp introduces additional uncertainty: projects built around Terraform, such as CDK for Terraform, could be deprioritized or discontinued based on IBM's commercial decisions. With OpenTofu, the roadmap is public, discussed through open RFCs, and does not depend on decisions made behind closed doors by a single actor.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) has become a central component of any modern architecture. Authentication, user management, access control, regulatory compliance: these building blocks are critical, yet their implementation and long-term operation often remain complex.

To address these challenges, Clever Cloud launched IAM Keycloak as a Service in spring 2025, in partnership with Please Open It, a company specialized in Keycloak integration and expertise. This collaboration made it possible to design a managed service aligned both with open source best practices and with the real-world constraints of production environments.

Since its launch, Keycloak as a Service has evolved significantly to meet the concrete needs of businesses and the requirements of operating IAM at scale.

A Managed Keycloak, Built for Production

Keycloak as a Service is based on a simple approach: delivering the full functional richness of Keycloak without requiring teams to handle infrastructure, maintenance, or monitoring.

The service is natively integrated into the Clever Cloud Console. It therefore becomes a fully-fledged component of the platform, managed from a single control point, just like our other managed services.

Secured Multi Instances: High Availability and Scalability

One of the major evolutions is Secured Multi Instances. It enables Keycloak to be deployed in a clustered setup with multiple nodes, ensuring load distribution and high availability for a critical component such as IAM.

This architecture strengthens service continuity and the ability to handle increased traffic, while meeting the standards expected in production environments. Configuration and management of this architecture are directly accessible from the Clever Cloud Console.

A Dedicated Dashboard in the Console

A Keycloak dashboard is now available in the Clever Cloud Console. It centralizes the service’s essential information along with common administrative actions, making day-to-day management simpler and avoiding the need to juggle multiple tools.

Built-in Monitoring, Included

Monitoring is natively integrated into the service. Operational visibility is immediately available, with no additional configuration or external tools required.

This integrated approach simplifies operations while maintaining a high level of control over how your IAM runs.

Continuous Maintenance and Updates

Managed Keycloak is kept up to date. Recent Keycloak versions are made available as the product evolves, with no operational burden on the customer side.

This ensures access to security patches and functional improvements without heavy or risky upgrade projects.

Simplified addition to your applications

A more structural development concerns Request Flow, a technical foundation that makes it easier to use tools to secure access to your applications, including OAuth2-Proxy.

The latter is compatible with Keycloak, and its configuration is simplified on Clever Cloud. This allows you to implement authentication upstream of the application without modifying the application code. It is particularly well-suited for securing existing applications, back-offices, internal tools, or exposed services.

To Go Further

To present these evolutions in detail, share the technical choices behind them, and answer questions, a live session on Twitch and YouTube is scheduled for February 26 at 1:00 PM. It will be hosted by Horacio Gonzalez (Clever Cloud), joined by Mathieu Passenaud (Please Open It).

It will be an opportunity to take a concrete look at how our managed Keycloak works and to discuss real-world IAM use cases in production environments.

Identity Access Management (IAM) is now one of the foundations of information system security and governance. Behind this term lies a very concrete reality: an organization’s ability to precisely control who can access what, when, and under which conditions.

At Clever Cloud, these challenges are approached from a resolutely operational perspective. As a European provider of managed cloud services, Clever Cloud has been supporting public and private organizations for over ten years as they face strong requirements in terms of security, compliance, cost control, and skills management. The Keycloak as a Service offering is a direct extension of this hands-on experience.

Identity Access Management: an operational reality before a concept

An Identity Access Management system is not limited to user authentication. It structures access to applications, APIs, and data as a whole.

In practical terms, an effective IAM makes it possible to:

• reliably identify users and services;
• apply consistent and auditable access rules;
• centralize authentication and authorization;
• track access to meet security and compliance requirements.

In modern environments, where internal applications, cloud services, partners, and customers coexist, IAM quickly becomes a critical control point. Any weakness at this level has immediate consequences, both for security and service continuity.

Security, compliance, costs: why IAM has become strategic

Feedback from the field is clear: a significant proportion of security incidents originate from identity or poorly configured access rights. Dormant accounts, excessive permissions, lack of traceability—these are common situations when access management is fragmented.

From a regulatory standpoint, organizations must be able to demonstrate their ability to control and justify access to data. GDPR, NIS2, and upcoming obligations related to AI all require rigorous identity governance.

Added to this are very concrete challenges around skills and budget management. Operating an IAM solution in-house requires trained, available teams capable of keeping up with rapidly evolving security standards. Conversely, some proprietary offerings can create strong vendor lock-in and pricing models that are difficult to predict.

IAM has therefore become a board-level topic as much as a technical one.

Keycloak: a proven open source standard

Keycloak has established itself as one of the leading open source solutions for Identity Access Management. Widely used by companies, public administrations, and software vendors, it is built on broadly adopted open standards.

Keycloak notably covers:

• Single Sign-On (SSO);
• identity federation with existing directories or external providers;
• multi-factor authentication;
• fine-grained role and permission management;
• native integration with OAuth2, OpenID Connect, and SAML.

Its open source nature provides full transparency into security mechanisms and avoids technological lock-in. This is a decisive factor for organizations that want to retain long-term control over their IAM.

The limits of self-hosted Keycloak

In practice, deploying Keycloak is only the first step. Running it under production conditions quickly raises fundamental questions:

• high availability and resilience;
• regular updates and security patches;
• backups and restoration;
• monitoring and incident management;
• securing the underlying infrastructure.

These topics require specific expertise and operational time. For many teams, they become a constraint—or even a risk.

Keycloak as a Service by Clever Cloud: expertise applied to IAM

With Keycloak as a Service, Clever Cloud brings its experience as a managed cloud operator to IAM. The solution is based on standard Keycloak, without proprietary modifications, and runs in a hosting environment designed for critical workloads.

Clever Cloud takes care of all operational aspects: hosting, updates, monitoring, backups, and availability. Customer teams remain in control of functional configuration, access rules, and application integrations.

This clear split of responsibilities secures usage while keeping costs and required skills under control.

European hosting and digital trust

Identity data is among the most sensitive data in an information system. Its hosting and processing cannot be left to chance.

Keycloak as a Service is operated on European infrastructures, within a framework compliant with applicable regulatory requirements. This approach ensures better data control, increased transparency, and essential auditability for organizations under strict constraints.

Open source plays a central role here: it makes it possible to understand, verify, and evolve security mechanisms without relying on a technological black box.

An IAM building block for modern architectures

Keycloak as a Service integrates naturally into cloud-native architectures, whether for web applications, microservices, or APIs.

It unifies access management across heterogeneous applications, simplifies the user experience through SSO, and strengthens the overall consistency of the information system.

For technical teams and decision-makers alike, this translates into better visibility, reduced risk, and more robust access governance.

A live demo is scheduled for February 26 at 1 p.m. on Twitch and YouTube, hosted by Horacio Gonzalez and Mathieu Passenaud from Please Open It.

Frequently asked questions about Identity Access Management

What is an Identity Access Management solution used for in practice?

An Identity Access Management solution centralizes and secures access to applications, services, and data. It ensures that each user or service has only the rights it needs, while providing full traceability of access. IAM is both a security, compliance, and information system governance tool.

What is the difference between IAM and simple authentication?

Authentication addresses only part of the problem: verifying a user’s identity. Identity Access Management goes further by managing authorizations, roles, identity federation, account lifecycle, and access auditing. This holistic view is what makes it possible to secure complex environments.

Why choose an open source IAM solution like Keycloak?

An open source solution like Keycloak is based on open and transparent standards. It helps avoid vendor lock-in, provides a better understanding of security mechanisms, and preserves long-term evolution capabilities. This is particularly relevant for organizations concerned with technological control and compliance.

Is Keycloak suitable for complex enterprise environments?

Yes. Keycloak is widely used in enterprise contexts, including distributed and multi-application architectures. It integrates with existing directories, supports strong authentication, and enables fine-grained management of roles and permissions.

Why choose managed Keycloak rather than self-hosting?

Managed Keycloak allows organizations to benefit from the solution without bearing operational complexity. Hosting, updates, security, availability, and backups are handled by the operator. Teams can focus on use cases, functional configuration, and application integrations.

Where is identity data hosted with Keycloak as a Service?

With Keycloak as a Service, identity data is hosted on French infrastructures operated by Clever Cloud. This ensures compliance with regulatory requirements and strengthens control over sensitive data.

This press kit brings together all the announcements made at ACCES 2025, Clever Cloud’s annual event held during the FOST. It illustrates the company’s ambition to provide a comprehensive, sovereign, high-performance European platform designed for the needs of modern organisations.

1. Beta launch of Clever Kubernetes Engine (CKE)

Clever Cloud announces the opening of Clever Kubernetes Engine (CKE), its managed Kubernetes offering designed to deliver a reliable, sovereign and simplified production experience. CKE is the result of several years of work on infrastructure automation and managed services. The aim is to make Kubernetes accessible to organisations without imposing the operational complexity involved in managing a traditional cluster.

Kubernetes has become an industry standard, but it can also introduce difficulties: control plane management, security, upgrades and monitoring. CKE takes on these responsibilities. The control plane is fully managed, upgrades are transparent, and nodes adjust automatically to demand. This approach allows teams to use Kubernetes as a tool without dealing with its operational constraints — in the Clever Cloud spirit.

CKE stands out thanks to Materia etcd, integrated as the underlying consistency and high-availability layer, replacing traditional etcd. This choice brings resilience, stability and predictable performance. CKE integrates natively with other Clever Cloud services: S3 object storage, databases, Pulsar, Network Groups, IAM, and more. Workloads can be deployed via kubectl, Helm or GitOps, while the infrastructure is operated by Clever Cloud.

With CKE, Clever Cloud strengthens its position as a credible European alternative to Big Tech Kubernetes platforms, in a sovereign, compliant and controlled environment. The offering is aligned with a shared 2026 roadmap.

2. New AI hosting and compute platform (H1 2026)

Clever Cloud announces a new AI platform developed with SpiNNcloud, available in the first half of 2026. This European neuromorphic infrastructure is designed to provide a high-performance, efficient and sovereign environment suitable for training, adaptation and inference of AI models.

SpiNNcloud technology already enables a significant reduction in the cost and energy consumption of AI workloads, with substantial gains expected for future architectures. Hosted and operated by Clever Cloud, the infrastructure guarantees a European framework independent from extra-European providers.

Offered through a flexible model, the platform will allow companies to use the capacity they need with no upfront investment. It integrates with the broader Clever Cloud ecosystem, providing a complete chain from data to model deployment in a coherent, controlled and transparent environment.

3. Materia: major updates for KV and launch of Materia TS (Tech Preview)

Materia, Clever Cloud’s serverless database product line, continues to evolve with significant improvements to Materia KV and the launch of Materia TS in tech preview.

Materia KV: enhancements

Materia KV gains stability, performance and an improved ability to handle substantial workloads, while retaining its serverless principles: strong consistency, high availability and automatic scaling. The new version also introduces KV Explorer, a tool within the Clever Cloud console for visualising, filtering and querying data via a dedicated terminal. These improvements strengthen KV’s use cases for microservices, operational data and distributed architectures.

Materia TS: tech preview launch

At the event, Clever Cloud will present Materia TS, the first engine in the range dedicated to time-series data. Built on technologies from the Warp 10 ecosystem, it is designed for observability, IoT, industrial environments, telemetry and continuous monitoring.

Materia TS enables ingestion, storage and analysis of massive volumes of time-series data thanks to an engine optimised for compression, structuring and time-based analytics. With Materia KV and TS, the Materia range becomes a comprehensive foundation covering several data models (SQL, KV, TS), fully integrated into Clever Cloud automation.

4. Strategic partnership with 2CRSI

Clever Cloud announces a strategic partnership with 2CRSI to develop hardware infrastructures that natively embed Clever Cloud technologies. Bringing together a European high-performance server manufacturer and a sovereign cloud provider, this collaboration aims to produce solutions designed for performance, efficiency and reliability.

The first systems resulting from this partnership will target critical environments — industry, telecoms, sensitive infrastructures — where security, traceability and governance are essential. This initiative extends Clever Cloud’s commitments to an independent and sustainable European infrastructure.

5. New Clever Cloud offering for Industry 4.0: unified Edge & Cloud platform

Clever Cloud introduces its offering dedicated to Industry 4.0, designed for industrial environments requiring security, continuity, low latency and controlled deployment processes. The offering combines on-premise, edge and cloud execution within a unified software framework based on Clever Cloud automation.

At its core, Clever Edge enables the deployment and maintenance of industrial applications close to equipment: production sites, embedded devices, virtualised environments or cloud environments. The platform is based on a Kubernetes distribution capable of running containers, VMs and system processes, with integrated management of networking, storage, updates, security, monitoring and logging.

The offering includes management of air-gapped environments — essential for sectors subject to strict regulatory requirements.

Designed for real-world Industry 4.0 use cases (logistics, industrial IoT, automation, distributed supervision), new customers are already using this offering. It targets manufacturing, logistics, industrial and sensitive sectors seeking resilience, autonomy and sovereignty.

6. Clever Cloud expands its infrastructure with two new data centres in Paris

Clever Cloud expands its infrastructure by opening two new points of presence in the Paris region, at ETIX Paris #3 in Vélizy and Telehouse TH3 in Magny-les-Hameaux, to support the company’s growth and the increasing demand for hosting capacity. First availability is expected in early 2026. With these two sites, Clever Cloud will operate five data centres in Île-de-France.

Clever Cloud selected ETIX for its ISO 27001, HDH and PCI DSS-certified infrastructure, suited to sensitive environments. As a key player in fully sovereign data centres, ETIX relies on a dense national footprint and an energy strategy based on a target PUE of 1.3, along with ISO 14001, ISO 50001 and ASHRAE certifications — aligned with Clever Cloud’s commitments to efficiency and sustainability.

“Our infrastructures are designed to combine high density, energy efficiency and reliability. This approach allows us to support the rise of cloud and artificial intelligence while controlling our environmental impact,” says Louis Blanchot, CEO of ETIX.

The Telehouse TH3 data centre, built on a former military site, provides a high level of availability (99.99% SLA), reinforced physical security and electrical capacities suited to scaling workloads. Already present at TH2, one of France’s main Internet hubs, Clever Cloud extends its connectivity and multi-site resilience with TH3. The site is ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 27001 and ISO 50001 certified.

7. Grist joins the Clever Cloud marketplace

Grist joins the Clever Cloud marketplace. This modern tool for manipulating and collaborating on tabular data allows teams to build internal applications, tracking dashboards and business workflows quickly. Hosted on Clever Cloud, Grist benefits from a sovereign environment and seamless integration with the platform’s other services.

8. Product updates: FerretDB, Pulsar General Availability & Network Groups

Clever Cloud announces three major product updates:

• FerretDB enhances the managed database offering with an open-source, MongoDB-compatible alternative.
• Apache Pulsar reaches General Availability, providing a mature engine for event-driven architectures and distributed systems.
• Network Groups introduce advanced network segmentation to isolate, organise and secure applications.

These developments strengthen Clever Cloud’s ability to serve as a complete foundation for modern applications requiring performance, security, cost control and strategic autonomy.

The announcement was made during the Franco-German summit “Summit on European Digital Sovereignty – Shaping Europe’s digital future. Together.” Both companies see this collaboration as a key lever to make artificial intelligence more accessible and truly sovereign in Europe.

They note that despite growing interest in AI, industrial adoption is still significantly hindered by computing costs. SpiNNcloud’s current systems already reduce certain costs by up to 17x. The next architecture, SpiNNext, is expected to push efficiency gains even further, with potential savings of up to 80x. A breakthrough that could reshape the dynamics of AI industrialization on the continent.

A Franco-German cooperation for a sovereign AI infrastructure

The two partners see their collaboration as a structuring component of a Franco-German  initiative dedicated to AI infrastructures. They emphasize that sustainable competition with global giants will only be possible by strengthening cooperation among European players. Their ambition goes beyond their own partnership: they aim to involve other innovative SMEs across the continent to form a network of expertise capable of delivering essential digital building blocks without external dependency.

Clever Cloud operates a European cloud platform for hosting, automation, databases, and orchestration. All technology is developed in-house and operated in Europe. The company employs around one hundred people and serves customers in more than 120 countries. 
SpiNNcloud, for its part, develops computing architectures inspired by the human brain, designed for high-performance computing and artificial intelligence applications. Its systems currently rely on the SpiNNaker2 architecture, while SpiNNext is already under development.

The cooperation has entered an operational phase. The first SpiNNcloud systems are being integrated into Clever Cloud’s infrastructure, and technical tests are underway. Two workstreams are being developed: leveraging the performance of the systems for intensive computing, and a shared “Token as a Service” layer, enabling companies to use AI services -language models or other algorithms - based on actual consumption, with significantly reduced costs and energy usage. The teams have aligned their roadmap around integration, security, and operations.

By relying on European technologies-both hardware and software-the two companies aim to contribute to the emergence of a truly independent AI infrastructure. Following the summit, they plan to continue discussions with French, German, and European authorities to share insights on infrastructures, energy efficiency, and digital sovereignty. The event held between President Emmanuel Macron and Chancellor Friedrich Merz also provided a platform for extensive exchanges with the attending delegations.

Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud, States: “We want a Europe that develops its own technologies and takes control of its digital future. With SpiNNcloud, we demonstrate that European industry not only has the expertise but also the determination to address the major challenges of AI: costs, energy consumption, sovereignty. This collaboration shows that a cooperating Europe can design high-performance, efficient, and truly independent infrastructures.”

Hector Gonzalez, CEO of SpiNNcloud, adds: “With Clever Cloud, we found an ideal partner to bring the unique energy efficiency of our brain-inspired systems to industrial use cases. This Franco-German cooperation proves that Europe has the technological building blocks needed to build competitive and sovereign solutions.”

About SpiNNcloud

SpiNNcloud is reinventing AI infrastructure through a brain-inspired computing architecture designed to drastically reduce energy consumption while maintaining high performance. Its event-based approach, in which computations occur only when needed, opens up new margins of efficiency. The company provides complete systems to research centers and enterprises worldwide.

Want to learn more about this project?

Feel free to contact us.

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This change accompanies Clever Cloud’s rapid growth, its international expansion, and the structuring of its offering.

Our name remains the same, and so does our mission — but our domain is evolving, reflecting the growth of a company that has expanded its reach, strengthened its international footprint, and now counts over 100 team members.

Change in continuity

This new domain marks an important milestone in Clever Cloud’s development. In recent years, the company has experienced steady growth, driven by the trust of public and private organizations managing sensitive data, and by a growing awareness of the need for a sovereign and controlled cloud.

This momentum now extends beyond borders. Clever Cloud has expanded internationally, with major initiatives such as the creation of subsidiaries in Côte d’Ivoire and Morocco, and new partnerships underway in other parts of the world — including Kazakhstan, where the company contributes to the development of trusted local infrastructures.

This growth is built on a proven model: an independent, reliable cloud that meets the highest standards of compliance, while being adapted to local challenges through partnerships.

“The move to clever.cloud reflects who we’ve become: a solid, recognized company growing across Europe and beyond, while staying true to its original mission,” says Quentin Adam, CEO and co-founder of Clever Cloud.
“It’s a natural evolution to support our growth and strengthen the clarity and simplicity of our identity.”

Simplifying to move forward

The transition to clever.cloud reflects a broader commitment to simplicity and consistency.

A shorter, clearer, and more intuitive domain — just like what Clever Cloud builds every day: technical solutions that are easy to use, with no compromise on performance or sovereignty.

This change aims to make the brand clearer and more accessible worldwide. It will also make it easier to deploy region-specific subdomains, supporting local marketing and communications while maintaining a coherent and unified structure.

“This change embodies Clever Cloud’s trajectory: a company that has grown, matured, and opened up internationally, while staying true to its values and its pursuit of simplicity” adds Quentin Adam.

The domain transition will take place gradually over the coming months, starting with the website and email addresses, followed by the console.

This strategic report evaluates global vendors capable of delivering mature cloud-native platforms, enabling product teams to deploy and operate modern applications and AI agents at scale.

A high-performance, open platform built for developers

Clever Cloud offers a cloud-native application platform that natively supports over 15 programming environments (JavaScript, PHP, .NET, Java, Python, Rust, etc.), as well as auto-scaling containers, integrated CI/CD workflows, instant rollbacks, detailed observability, and unified monitoring.

The platform also includes a managed services marketplace — databases, message queues, storage, identity management, AI services — with native support for hybrid deployment scenarios. Clever Cloud places developer experience and operational automation at the core of its value proposition.

“This mention in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant reflects the technical strength of our platform, our commitment to open source, and our ambition to build a credible European alternative to hyperscalers,”said Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud.

Recognition in a fast-moving market

Although Clever Cloud does not yet meet the revenue thresholds required for full quadrant inclusion, Gartner acknowledged its advanced technical capabilities, clear product vision, and growing impact in the European sovereign cloud ecosystem.

This recognition supports Clever Cloud’s broader growth strategy, including international expansion to deliver local cloud infrastructure in West and North Africa and Kazakhstan, the rollout of numerous new services, the development of Clever AI, and the announcement of a forthcoming managed Kubernetes offering.

Want to find out more? Watch our video demonstration or contact us!

In a context where scalability, availability, and speed are essential, hosting becomes a key element. An optimized infrastructure like Clever Cloud enhances performance and secures both deployments and environment management.

What is Sylius?

The technical robustness of Sylius allows teams to quickly tailor the platform to your specific business needs while providing a stable and maintainable foundation that grows with your company.

Why Build a Sylius Project with Monsieur Biz?

Monsieur Biz is a specialized agency in Sylius since 2017. This early positioning allowed the agency to develop deep expertise in the framework and its ecosystem. As an official Sylius partner and active contributor, the agency has built numerous open-source plugins and developed custom solutions tailored to specific business needs.

This dual competency—community contribution and bespoke development—makes Monsieur Biz a trusted technical partner for Sylius projects.

Why Sylius is a Strategic Choice for Custom Projects

While platforms like Shopify may be suitable for simple, standard needs, they quickly become limiting (and expensive) when customization is required. Sylius, by contrast, offers a robust and modular technical foundation built on Symfony, allowing for a high degree of customization.

Sylius uses modern standards. All features are thoroughly tested, and the framework recently transitioned from PHP Spec to PHPUnit—more widely adopted within the PHP community—thus improving code quality and maintainability. If you’d like to learn more about Sylius, feel free to consult the available documentation.

A Team of Web & E-Commerce Quality Experts

All Monsieur Biz developers are Opquast-certified, a well-recognized standard in the web industry. This certification ensures strong mastery of essential e-commerce topics: performance, accessibility, security, user experience, and development best practices.

Monsieur Biz doesn’t just deliver technical features; they guide, advise, and structure complex e-commerce projects while contributing meaningful insights.

A Key Player in the Sylius Ecosystem

Monsieur Biz is deeply involved in the Sylius community. The agency regularly participates in technical conferences like Forum PHP, where it will speak in October 2025 about the release of Sylius 2.

They also take part in strategic roundtables organized by the Sylius team, enabling them to closely follow the framework’s roadmap and technical direction.

Hosting & Deployment on Clever Cloud: Performance at Scale

To support its Sylius projects, Monsieur Biz naturally turned to Clever Cloud. The agency was seeking a reliable and flexible PaaS hosting platform perfectly suited to developer workflows.

Clever Cloud meets these requirements by offering full control over infrastructure, advanced deployment automation, and high production stability—key assets for industrializing complex e-commerce platforms.

A Fully Controlled Environment

With Clever Cloud, you retain control over every component of the project:

• File systems
• Databases
• PHP applications
• Redis cache
• Keycloak authentication, and more

All environments are configurable entirely via command-line, simplifying the automation of deployments, removals, and infrastructure updates.

Proactive Technical Support and Expert Guidance

When needed, Clever Cloud provides ultra-responsive support with complete transparency. This close collaboration is especially valuable for high-stakes projects.

In critical situations, Clever Cloud can quickly mobilize a dedicated team of experts to analyze and resolve issues—whether infrastructure-related, application-specific, or security-related.

This level of commitment is rare among cloud providers and is widely recognized by Clever Cloud clients as a key differentiator.

Security, Data Sovereignty, and GDPR Compliance

Clever Cloud’s hosting can be localized in France if requested—a crucial advantage for Monsieur Biz clients operating primarily within the country. Beyond GDPR compliance, local hosting also benefits SEO: servers located near end users reduce page load times, a ranking factor considered by Google.

Clever Cloud also holds the necessary security certifications for managing sensitive data, including health data (HDS certification obtained in January 2025), ensuring full regulatory compliance.

Importantly, Clever Cloud is not subject to any extraterritorial legislation, such as the Cloud Act or FISA.

SEO Advantages

As mentioned, hosting in France improves loading times (a known Google ranking factor). But Clever Cloud goes further with technical SEO enhancements. Its high-performance infrastructure enables excellent Core Web Vitalsscores, particularly in server response time (TTFB) and layout stability (CLS).

Thanks to fine resource management, load times remain consistent even during traffic spikes. Continuous deployment also supports frequent optimizations (compression, caching, URL structure) without regression risk—key levers to improve organic visibility and deliver a top-tier user experience.

Accelerate Your E-Commerce Projects with Monsieur Biz, Sylius & Clever Cloud

Whether you’re launching an e-commerce website, a business platform, a showcase site, or any other headless architecture, the combination of Monsieur Biz, Sylius, and Clever Cloud is ideal for demanding web projects. This synergy tackles complex use cases while ensuring high performance, reliability, and control.

The high level of industrialization shortens go-to-market times and ensures long-term service quality. The customization of Sylius, the development rigor of Monsieur Biz, and the infrastructure reliability of Clever Cloud create an environment primed for continuous innovation—with no hidden costs or technical compromises.

This trio is ideal for companies seeking customization, performance, and expert guidance, no matter the complexity of their project.

FAQ

How much does it cost to develop a Sylius project?

The cost depends on the level of customization and features needed. Faster to develop than Magento, a project typically starts around €10,000. Pricing increases with project complexity.

How is Sylius different from Shopify and Magento?

• Shopify is a turnkey solution, quick to launch but limited in flexibility.
• Magento is powerful but expensive to build.
• Sylius offers the best of both: more open than Shopify, lighter than Magento, and fully suited to custom projects.

Is Sylius suitable for large-scale use?

Yes. Sylius is designed for scalability. Its modern architecture (Symfony) supports large catalogs and high traffic with the right infrastructure.

What resources are needed to maintain a Sylius site?

A Sylius site requires a technical team proficient in Symfony/PHP for development and maintenance. One or more developers are typically needed. Costs and workload depend on the complexity and evolution pace of your site.

It was built to manage infrastructure — and in doing so, it carries complexity and then hidden costs. And at Clever Cloud, our guiding principle is to empower developers productivity, security, and autonomy.

Since then, the context has changed. The market is evolving, our clients too, and we now have the technological maturity to address such a need … in our own way. Here's why we took the time to create our own version of ETCD, and why Kubernetes is finally arriving at Clever Cloud.

Why we didn’t jump on Kubernetes earlier

In the past, we never saw Kubernetes as a key driver for simplification. It’s sometimes experienced as an additional layer of complexity, especially for teams who just want to deploy, scale, and secure their applications: focus on value creation without spending too much time on the rest. 

But scaling up often creates complicated machinery. As a cloud provider, we have to deliver on a very large scale. Our orchestrator, developed and enriched through 15 years of production experience, enables this. By directly executing runtimes (about fifteen, including Node.JS, PHP, Rust, Scala, Docker, etc.), our orchestration goes further in fine-grained provisioning and auto-scaling, smarter updates, and better security.

For us, containerization is not the be-all and end-all. If a runtime exists, we prefer to ease how to use it, natively provide it: this allows us to control the security updates of the base image without relying on the application team’s goodwill. For any code that doesn’t match an existing runtime, we naturally offer deployment via Docker images. However, bear in mind that while we can update the image, we cannot patch or update the encapsulated code.

However, as we continue to grow, we're meeting increasingly larger prospects who are using Kubernetes. The market demands Kubernetes. More and more customers want interoperability with their existing tools, fine-grained workload management, or simply a standard for their teams. We couldn’t ignore it.

The weakest link in Kubernetes: ETCD

Kubernetes is often called the “the cloud’s operating system”. But like every OS, it relies on a critical component: ETCD — a distributed key-value store meant to record the cluster’s global state. And that’s where problems begin.

ETCD can’t handle the load. Its architecture, designed for modest cases, sets a hard 8 GB technical limit. Performances drop as soon as you scale up, documentation is lacking, and project governance has been weakened by successive maintainer changes.

It’s no coincidence that Google, Microsoft and other hyperscalers have rewritten their own versions of ETCD — or that projects like k3s replaced it with PostgreSQL. It’s an operational nightmare when your job is to keep systems running. When each customer has their own Kubernetes cluster, it potentially means thousands of ETCD instances to manage, each with its quirks, backups, and varying performance. In short: a challenge for our teams 

Rethinking ETCD from the ground up: Our In-House Stack

So we did what Clever Cloud does best: smart reinvention. Using Materia KV, our serverless key-value database built on FoundationDB, we implemented ETCD our way.

Specifically, we recreated the key compatibility APIs (KeyValue, Watch, Lease, Compaction…) by interfacing them with infrastructure we fully control, offering:

• A multi-tenant architecture, designed for scale. Since we use FoundationDB as the database, we can apply horizontal scaling. Usually, adding nodes to ETCD slows it down — but each node added in MateriaETCD allows us to host more clients without negative impact;
• Fine-grained management of transactions, permissions, quotas, and statistics;
• A coherent stack maintained by our teams.

The result: a logically ETCD-compatible database — fast, reliable, scalable — built on FoundationDB, and operated at Clever Cloud scale. No more fragile clusters or overwhelmed DBAs: everything is integrated, industrialized, and instrumentable.

More importantly, this solution offers exceptional resilience, directly inherited from FoundationDB. Thanks to continuous simulation in a distributed environment, we can validate every software release across thousands of simulated failure scenarios. It’s a rare level of robustness that enables us to anticipate edge cases and guarantee very high service availability — and therefore, yours. This approach gives us unprecedented confidence in our ability to manage thousands of Kubernetes clusters without falling into the trap of exponentially growing operational complexity.

Clever Cloud Managed Kubernetes: a sovereign, pragmatic approach

We’re not changing our vision: our PaaS remains the best solution for teams seeking maximum productivity and security with minimal effort. But we also understand that some organizations need Kubernetes for architectural, portability, or standardization reasons.

That’s why our managed Kubernetes enters private access phase today. If you're a Clever Cloud customer and want to test it, you can contact us now to get it.

Our pledge? An integrated, secure, and mastered Kubernetes — built on a solid technical foundation. A Kubernetes that adheres to best practices — but without the flaws of its legacy components. A Kubernetes that finally lets you focus on your business.