As France’s national railway operator, SNCF has always treated data governance and operational control as mission-critical. That priority became even more urgent when we launched our large-scale cloud migration program in 2018.

Today, 70% of our 2,000 applications run across public clouds, modernized through containers, serverless architectures, and managed services. Kubernetes quickly became a central pillar of this transformation and now powers roughly 30% of our application portfolio. At scale—operating more than 200 Kubernetes clusters across Azure and AWS—we learned that Kubernetes is not just a container orchestrator; it is the control plane for modern application platforms.

But we also learned something deeper: Kubernetes performs best when it runs on infrastructure that is predictable, programmable, and fully under your control. Networking, storage, compute, and load balancing must be designed to serve Kubernetes—not constrain it.

To bring that level of control to our remaining on premise workloads, we built our private cloud strategy around Kubernetes and full automation. In 2023, we selected OpenStack to provide the infrastructure layer beneath it, enabling us to deliver a cloud-native platform with public-cloud parity while maintaining sovereignty and governance requirements. In addition Openstack allows us to serve simple architectural patterns based on Virtual Machines, simple solutions for simple needs.

The overall result is a high-performance, open-source platform where Kubernetes is the consistent abstraction layer across every environment—public and private—allowing us to continue modernizing applications at scale while retaining full control of our infrastructure's future.

Presented at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 during Keynote - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEcTzLdjmJA