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

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.

Animé par Horacio Gonzalez - @LostInBrittany
avec la participation de :

• Mathieu Ancelin - @TrevorReznik
• Darya Khendrik - @DKhendrik
• Sébastien Allemand - @allema_s
• Anis Nielsen - @nielsenaa

Épisode enregistré le 18 décembre 2024

Chapitrage et Liens

00:00:16 : Intro et présentation des participants

00:03:25 : Problème de prod chez openai lié à Kubernetes : it's always kube-dns / coredns / kube-proxy
https://x.com/rauchg/status/1868047569299099903
https://status.openai.com/incidents/ctrsv3lwd797

00:06:38 : Amazon prétend que les développeurs ne codent qu'une heure par jour, et que l'IA est la solution pour plus de temps de codage
https://programmation.developpez.com/actu/365731/Amazon-pretend-que-les-developpeurs-ne-codent-qu-une-heure-par-jour-et-que-l-IA-est-la-solution-pour-plus-de-temps-de-codage-AWS-presente-Amazon-Q-Developer-son-outil-d-assistant-dote-d-IA/
https://programmation.developpez.com/actu/345479/Le-temps-perdu-par-les-developpeurs-couterait-des-milliards-aux-entreprises-un-gaspillage-qui-est-estime-a-environ-12-97-milliards-de-dollars-par-an/

00:17:50 : Les entreprises qui forcent les retours au bureau perdent leurs meilleurs talents
https://www.corporate-rebels.com/blog/what-happens-when-you-a-b-test-hybrid-work-the-results-are-fascinating
https://emploi.developpez.com/actu/365909/Les-entreprises-qui-forcent-les-retours-au-bureau-perdent-leurs-meilleurs-talents-selon-une-etude-les-donnees-disponibles-n-etablissent-pourtant-pas-que-les-employes-au-bureau-sont-plus-productifs/

00:31:40 : Transport for London hack - 30 000 employees reset in person MDP
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/tfl-requires-in-person-password-resets-for-30-000-employees-after-hack/

00:35:40 : Le langage Go souffle ses 15 bougies et atteint sa position la plus haute sur l'indice Tiobe
https://programmation.developpez.com/actu/364901/Le-langage-Go-souffle-ses-15-bougies-et-atteint-sa-position-la-plus-haute-sur-l-indice-Tiobe-Google-annonce-que-le-nombre-d-utilisateurs-de-Go-a-plus-que-triple-au-cours-des-cinq-dernieres-annees/
State of Javascript : https://piccalil.li/links/state-of-java-script-2024/

00:43:30 : Tools : Bruno, un client API Open Source
https://www.usebruno.com/
Alternative open source à Postman ( https://www.postman.com/ ) ou Insomnia ( https://insomnia.rest/ )

00:47:55 : Markitdown - https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown
microsoft opensource un tool python pour transformer des fichiers PDF, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Images, Audio, HTML, CSV, JSON, XML, ZIP en markdown
https://www.clever.cloud/fr/blog/engineering-fr/2024/12/16/markitdown-as-a-service-de-lai-a-la-production-sur-clever-cloud/

Musique de fin : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JglOS8TRFp4

Animé par Horacio Gonzalez - @LostInBrittany
avec la participation de :
- Antoine Sabot-Durand- @antoine_sd
- Erwan Rougeux - @ERougeux
- Florentin Dubois - @FlorentinDUBOIS

Épisode enregistré le 18 juillet 2024

👋 Venez discuter avec nous sur @clever_cloudFR pour nous dire ce que vous avez pensé de ce nouvel épisode.

➡️ Pour découvrir ou réécouter d’anciens épisodes c’est par ici !

Chapitrage et liens

00:00:16 : Introduction et présentation des participants

00:04:07 : Sujet: Plugin *.google.com dans chromium-based https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018?s=46&t=TTwUj4NwwFWNozryQD5j4Q

00:14:19 : Sujet: Open source et foundations Clever Cloud joins the Eclipse Foundation: https://www.clever.cloud/blog/press/2024/07/10/clever-cloud-joins-the-eclipse-foundation/

00:26:10 : les grands groupes et le cloud DevOps Topologies : https://web.devopstopologies.com/ We are leaving the cloud

https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47e0

Kubernetes Comic https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/kubernetes-comic

00:49:11 : HAProxy 3 !

https://www.haproxy.com/blog/announcing-haproxy-3-0 https://www.haproxy.com/blog/reviewing-every-new-feature-in-haproxy-3-0

Maglev https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/44824.pdf

https://engineering.fb.com/2018/05/22/open-source/open-sourcing-katran-a-scalable-network-load-balancer/

https://blog.cloudflare.com/high-availability-load-balancers-with-maglev

https://github.blog/2018-08-08-glb-director-open-source-load-balancer/ https://github.com/openelb/openelb

00:54:17 : Manifold: Digital Asset Management

3D DAM : https://manyfold.app/

Dans ce formidable épisode nous parlons de la disparition des protocoles TLS 1.0 et 1.1 sur Clever Cloud, de notre Operator pour Kubernetes, de Rolland Garros sauce NFT, des drivers Nvidia en open source pour Linux, des suites du DDos du bloggeur Amos, de sécurité autour d'Heroku et de Doctolib, de développement de module Kernel en Rust avant de présenter l'outil de la semaine pour enfin finir en musique.

👋 Venez discuter avec nous sur @clever_cloudFR pour nous dire ce que vous avez pensé de ce nouvel épisode.

➡️ Pour découvrir ou réécouter d’anciens épisodes c’est par ici !

Timecode & Liens

00:00:00 Introduction et présentation d’Alexandre Gourdel

Avant de passer aux sujets de sociétés, quelques annonces de Clever Cloud

00:09:40 Removal of tls 1.0 and 1.1 (Clément)
https://www.clever.cloud/blog/engineering/2022/05/03/removal-of-tls-1-0-and-1-1-from-our-load-balancers-on-june-30/

00:12:40 Et si on testait le Clever Operator pour Kubernetes ? (Florentin)
https://blog.zwindler.fr/2022/05/17/et-si-on-testait-clever-kubernetes-operator/
https://www.clever.cloud/blog/engineering/2022/04/28/introducing-the-clever-cloud-rust-sdk/

00:15:56 Kubernetes 1.24: Introducing Non-Graceful Node Shutdown Alpha (Florentin)
https://kubernetes.io/blog/2022/05/20/kubernetes-1-24-non-graceful-node-shutdown-alpha/

00:19:05 Le sport se met aux NFT (Alexandre)
https://www.francetvinfo.fr/sports/manne-financiere-communaute-de-fans-elargie-attrait-des-sponsors-les-nft-nouvel-eldorado-dans-le-monde-du-sport_5116483.html
https://club.rolandgarros.com/fr
Un détenteur d’un NFT « RG Game, Seat & Match » bénéficiera de nombreux avantages : accès à la version virtuelle du court Philippe-Chatrier ainsi qu’à des expériences exceptionnelles (jouer sur les courts de Roland-Garros, remporter des billets pour les prochaines éditions du Grand Chelem parisien et du Rolex Paris Masters, visiter les coulisses du stade Roland-Garros…). Acquérir un NFT de cette collection, c’est aussi rejoindre une communauté de fans engagés, avec qui échanger et partager votre passion.

00:28:32 Nvidia ouvre les drivers linux de ses cartes graphiques (Clément)
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-open-kernel&num=1
En fait ils ont pas le choix
Quelques jours plus tôt, y’a deux boîtes qui ont réussi à casser LHR grâce à la fuite de février.

00:34:22 Amos a amélioré son serveur HTTP perso suite à un DDoS (Julien)
https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/1520937581059448838
https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-won-free-load-testing

00:45:45 À quoi ressemble la gestion d’un gros incident sécu, l'exemple Heroku
https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2413?updated
Tweet du seum pour heroku

00:52:48 La sécurité pour les nuls
https://www.francetvinfo.fr/internet/securite-sur-internet/enquete-doctolib-certaines-donnees-medicales-ne-sont-pas-entierement-protegees_5147644.html
Article touilleur : https://www.touilleur-express.fr/2022/03/08/le-chiffrement-de-bout-en-bout-et-la-signature-denveloppe/

01:02:00 Things Are Getting Rusty In Kernel Land (Florentin)
https://hackaday.com/2022/05/17/things-are-getting-rusty-in-kernel-land/
Conférence de Georges Thomas sur “Comment développer un module kernel en Rust”
Pourquoi des modules en Rust, plutôt qu’un autre langage ?
As kernel second-in-command [Greg Kroah-Hartman] put it, “drivers are probably the first place for an attempt like this as they are the ‘end leafs’ of the tree of dependencies in the kernel source. They depend on core kernel functionality, but nothing depends on them.”
Mais qu’est-ce qui se passe ? Que se passe-t-il ?
At some point in the future, one of the interested parties, like Google, would start writing new drivers in Rust. Google seems to be very interested in converting parts of Android to Rust, likely in an attempt to thwart the continued pwnage of their OS from the likes of the NSO group.
Another interesting connection is that [Miguel Ojeda], lead developer of the Rust for Linux effort, is now employed full time by Prossimo for that purpose. Prossimo is an arm of the Internet Security Research Group, which is also famous for leading Let’s Encrypt.

01:10:45 L'Outil de la semaine
https://vscodecandothat.com/

01:16:13 La musique de l’épisode : Billy Paul - Your Song - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbgYUj3jQoI