By Guillaume Nevicato, Sylva Co-chair and Telco Cloud Product Manager, Orange
When we kicked off Sylva Developer Day in Amsterdam on March 27, closing out an incredible KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 week, I had the privilege of sharing where Sylva stands today: what we’ve built, what we’ve proven, and where we’re headed. The short version? This project has never been stronger.
Sylva is a fundamental step toward telco cloud and edge homogenization and sustainability. And over the past year, that ambition has translated into concrete achievements across every dimension of the project, from code to community, from validation labs to production networks.
A governance built for collaboration
One of Sylva’s greatest strengths is how it’s structured. Our Technical Steering Committee brings together Orange, Deutsche Telekom, TIM, Telefónica, Vodafone, Nokia, and Ericsson, operators and vendors working side by side. Alongside Carlo Cavazzoni from TIM, I have the honor of co-chairing this effort.
Seven working groups drive the project forward, each led by experts from across the ecosystem: Telco Cloud Stack, Validation Center, Security, Sustainability, Communication & Adoption, Workloads Lifecycle Management with GitOps, and our newest addition, Cluster Networking. This structure isn’t just organizational, it reflects the breadth and depth of what Sylva covers, and the diversity of the people building it.
A year of technical achievements
The past twelve months have been remarkably productive. Here’s what stands out.
On the Cloud Stack front, we shipped three releases, V1.4, V1.5, and V1.6, each bringing deeper GitOps integration for workload clusters. Sylva now supports multiple Kubernetes distributions: Canonical K8S and OKD have joined our existing Vanilla K8S and RKE2 options. On the infrastructure side, OpenNebula now complements vSphere, OpenStack, and bare metal. This multi-K8S, multi-infrastructure approach is central to our promise of optionality and portability.
Our Validation Center has reached an impressive milestone: 22 workloads and network functions validated, spanning vendors like Nokia, Ericsson, Oracle, Huawei, ZTE, HPE, F5, Fortinet, and many more. We’ve introduced new validation stages that verify CNF security guidelines and cloud nativeness, added a new validation platform with Whitestack and OpenNebula, and expanded the validation process to cover Sylva flavors across RKE2, Canonical K8S, and OKD. The Validation Center, operated from platforms at Telefónica, Orange, Whitestack, and OpenNebula, is becoming a true cornerstone of trust for the ecosystem.
On Security, the team has made strides in CRA compliance for open-source stewardship, implementing a coordinated vulnerability disclosure process. We held our first in-person Security Workshop in Rennes, France, in May 2025, a pivotal moment for the group. New activities around hardening and OpenSSF scorecard implementation are raising the bar, and security experts have become core reviewers to accelerate merge requests related to image security. Security isn’t an afterthought in Sylva, it’s woven into the fabric of how we build.
Sustainability continues to set Sylva apart. The Green Dashboard received a major update for monitoring and reducing energy consumption, now featuring CO2 emission tracking per CNF and across multiple data centers. Perhaps most exciting: Sylva is actively supporting Horizontal Pod Autoscaler code evolution proposed by Benoit Lemoine to the broader CNCF community, contributing upstream improvements that demonstrate up to 22% energy efficiency gains. This is open source at its best: innovating locally, contributing globally.
The Workloads Lifecycle Management with GitOps working group held 12 exchange sessions over the year, with around 15 attendees per session and over 20 speakers. Topics ranged from CNF prerequisites and Day 2 configuration to FluxCD AI agents, supply chain security, and Git best practices. The group has even adapted its schedule to accommodate contributors from Australia (Telstra) and Chile (Whitestack), a sign that Sylva’s reach is becoming truly global.
The Communication & Adoption working group has been instrumental in making Sylva visible and accessible to the wider industry. Over the past year, the team published 40 LinkedIn posts, along with a steady stream of blog articles, quizzes, videos, press releases, and newsletters in partnership with Linux Foundation Europe. But the real impact has been on the ground: the team actively represented Sylva at major industry events including Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the LF Europe Summit in Ghent, the IPCEI event in Rotterdam, and Sylva Developer Day here in Amsterdam. Each of these touchpoints brought new faces into the community, sparked fresh conversations, and helped position Sylva at the forefront of open-source telco innovation. In a project where community growth is a strategic imperative, this is the engine that makes it happen.
And our newest working group, Cluster Networking, launched in September 2025 and is already delivering. The team is defining the evolution of Deutsche Telekom’s architecture with L2 and L3 automation, supporting multiple routing instances (FRR, 6WIND VSR, Juniper CRPD), and establishing CNI recommendations on Cilium and Calico.
From project to production
Perhaps the most powerful signal of Sylva’s maturity is that it’s running in production.
Orange Telco Cloud (OTC) is built on a subset of Sylva deployment scenarios, currently using RKE2 as its Kubernetes distribution with OpenStack and bare metal as infrastructure providers. We work with SUSE as an L4 support partner for open-source components, including emergency vulnerability management.
Our release process is straightforward and production-aligned: Sylva releases track odd Kubernetes versions with long-term support. Sylva V1.4 (K8S 1.31) maps to OTC V2, and Sylva V1.6 (K8S 1.33) will power OTC V3. In concrete terms, we’re operating 300 CaaS nodes in production as of Q1 2026, with a trajectory to reach 1,000 CaaS nodes by Q1 2027. Including IaaS and CaaS together, we’re already at 3,000 nodes across multiple European countries.
This is no longer a lab exercise. Sylva is powering real telco infrastructure, at scale.
Edge federation: the next frontier
One of the most exciting developments we showcased came straight from Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona. Telcos participating in Sylva, TIM, Vodafone, Telefónica, Orange, and Deutsche Telekom, demonstrated the capability to federate their edge environments, enabling seamless deployment of applications across their combined European footprint.
This is a game-changer. Operators are building new commercial offers based on edge services, following the GSMA Operator Platform business model. Sylva is positioned to become the natural edge cloud continuum for federated environments once this federation is commercially exploited. The pieces are falling into place.
A community that shows up
Behind every release, every validated CNF, every security patch, and every edge demo, there are people. From the KubeCon keynote stage in April 2025, to the Sylva Summit Europe in Ghent, to the Orange booth at MWC 2026, the energy in our community is palpable.
What’s next
Sylva is at an inflection point. We have the code, the governance, the validation infrastructure, the production track record, and, most importantly, the community. The road ahead is about scaling all of this: more distributions, more validated workloads, more production deployments, deeper edge federation, and continued upstream contribution to the cloud-native ecosystem.
Get involved, because in open source, every contribution counts.
