By Philippe Ensarguet (Orange) and Kai Steuernagel (Deutsche Telekom), Co-chairs, Sylva Governing Board
What a week. What energy. What a community.
As KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 wrapped up in Amsterdam, we had the privilege of closing out the week with Sylva Developer Day on Friday, March 27, a full day dedicated to the project, the people, and the momentum that is making Sylva one of the most exciting open source initiatives in the telco cloud space.
With more than 23 organizations represented, over 15 speakers, and 12 sessions spanning five major themes, Strategy & Adoption, Sovereign Cloud, GitOps & Automation, Resilience & Multi-tenancy, and Edge & Networks, this wasn’t just a developer event. It was a milestone for our community.
Open source as a strategic lever
We opened the day with a session on adoption and strategy, and we wanted to set the tone clearly: Sylva is not just a technical project. It is a strategic answer to a perfect storm that every telco operator is navigating today.
Geopolitical tensions, trade wars, and supply chain fragmentation. Regulatory pressure from NIS2, DORA, EU Digital Sovereignty frameworks, and data localization mandates. Growing vendor lock-in risk and the urgent need for cyber and infrastructure resilience. These forces are converging, and open source is how we respond, together.
Sylva brings this response to life. A sovereign cloud-native stack, built by telcos with telco imperative requirements, under Linux Foundation Europe governance. Resilience by architecture, multi-cloud, GitOps-driven, with automated validation and recovery. Optionality by design, no single-vendor dependency, composable and portable across environments. And competitiveness through collaboration, shared R&D costs, faster time-to-market, and open innovation with startups and vendors alike.
A growing ecosystem with real momentum
One of the messages we’re most passionate about is this: every new member strengthens the entire ecosystem. Growth isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a strategic imperative.
More contributors mean faster innovation, broader testing, and higher-quality code. More geographies bring resilience against regional disruptions and regulatory fragmentation. More diverse profiles unlock fresh thinking on edge, AI, security, and automation. And more members strengthen governance legitimacy and our path toward becoming an industry standard.
We’re actively growing along several axes: integration with IPCEI-CIS/8ra and other EU-funded programs, cloud-to-edge continuum use cases, outreach to adjacent business domains with similar infrastructure requirements, engagement with network function and hardware vendors, and, perhaps most exciting, riding the wave of generative and agentic AI.
Becoming the default choice for telco cloud
Sylva’s footprint continues to expand across the European ecosystem and beyond. The project is already part of IPCEI-CIS, 8ra, and lab8ra. It is integrated into the EURO-3C EU Horizon program and referenced in the EU Reference Telco Cloud Architecture. Sylva is part of the Cloud Native Telco Forum and has been identified by the CNCF Technical Advisory Board as a candidate for Cloud Native Reference Architecture.
This is just the beginning, and we intend to continue actively.
Spotlight on newcomers and innovation
One of the highlights of the day was our Open Innovation track, which put the spotlight on newcomers bringing fresh energy and capabilities to the Sylva ecosystem. Plakar presented their approach to cloud-native resilience for telco environments. Lablabee introduced a hands-on enablement platform designed to guide users from their first Sylva cluster all the way to production-grade validation. And Nearby Computing shared their work on leveraging edge deployments within the Sylva framework.
These newcomers are a living proof point of what our community stands for: openness, collaboration, and practical innovation.
Looking ahead: sovereignty, sustainability, security, and efficiency
Our long-term strategy rests on pillars that we believe define the future of telco infrastructure, now we concentrate on those where the industry faces the strongest challenges:
- Sovereignty, to face the geopolitical situation,
- Sustainability, to provide an answer to increasing energy cost,
- Security, to safeguard our critical infrastructure, and
- Efficiency, to counter the current and future chipset crisis
But there is more, we will also continue to deliver
- Cloud native and (Agentic) AI Telco by design.
- Telco/IT harmonization.
- Operational simplification.
This is the path we’re on, and we’re walking it together.
Thank you, Amsterdam!
To everyone who joined us at Sylva Developer Day: thank you. To those who spoke, contributed, challenged ideas, and sparked new ones: thank you. And to the broader KubeCon community that made this week unforgettable: see you next time.
Sylva is growing. The community is thriving. And the best is ahead of us.
Get involved, because in open source, every contribution counts.
