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Managing 16,000 edge locations with a platform for platforms
What if your platform works for every team, but none of the individual platforms can scale? Then you build a “platform for platforms,” as Kris Budde and Fabian Schmitt of Schwarz Digits showed at Edgecase 2026. They designed it for the Schwarz Group, which includes retailers such as Lidl and Kaufland. On top of that, they built a dedicated tool: Kubara. It’s super simple to use and quick to spin up locally. The record stands at just over five minutes.
The retail group has 16,000 locations that need to be able to run IT workloads. Edge computing matters here, because store systems have to keep working even when the connection to the central cloud drops. Schwarz Digits chose Talos Linux as the underlying infrastructure. But how do you manage thousands of Kubernetes clusters from one central place without creating a bottleneck in the management layer? For that, the Schwarz Group developed STACKIT Edge Cloud, using kcp to keep overhead down. kcp is a Kubernetes-like API that doesn’t run pods and provides central control. Kubara was added on top as a standardized platform layer. This lets components that used to run in every single cluster be shared.
Big impact
Every megabyte counts, say Budde and Schmitt. The gains come from small optimizations that add up across a large number of clusters. Tests showed that a virtual cluster with no workloads uses about 7.4 MB of memory. By moving components to a central layer, the team brought that down to 3 MB. “On a single cluster, that difference might not matter much. But across thousands of clusters, it becomes substantial!” says Kris Budde. In other words, the gain isn’t so much in making workloads faster, but in removing repetition from the infrastructure.
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Bootstrapping complete stacks
But that’s only the foundation, Budde and Schmitt explain. A Kubernetes cluster isn’t a complete platform yet. That’s why Schwarz Digits came up with Kubara, a command-line tool that generates and bootstraps a complete stack. It isn’t a locked-down platform, but a modular catalog of components. Users decide what they need, because not everyone has to run the same stack.
Record time
Together, STACKIT Edge Cloud and Kubara make it possible to work the same way across different environments, from a single edge location to an environment with large numbers of workload clusters. And it’s fast. The record for a local bootstrap stands at 5 minutes and 32 seconds!
The Schwarz Group case reflects what many organizations are dealing with. The question is no longer how to roll out Kubernetes. It’s how to organize Kubernetes so that the management layer can grow at the same scale as the infrastructure it manages.
