STACKIT: A cloud-to-edge continuum for Europe’s largest retailer

At TalosCon, we heard from STACKIT’s Martin Schüßler, (Lead Architect, STACKIT Distributed Cloud). STACKIT is part of the Schwartz Group, the parent company behind Lidl, Kaufland, and Europe's largest recycling operation. Schüßler presented how the group is building a unified edge computing platform across thousands of locations using Talos Linux and Kubernetes.

Schwartz Group runs compute at a massive scale, including in retail stores (self-checkout, waste sorting, logistics), food production facilities (AI-driven bakery sorting lines), and recycling plants. Previously, each location had been solving these problems independently. Then, they were tasked with unifying on a single platform.

The core architectural principle is autonomy over connectivity. Control planes run at the edge locations themselves, because power is more reliable than network links. Data stays local where possible as there is better privacy and latency and less to lose.

This philosophy shaped everything from hardware choices to software stack.

Here’s where that philosophy took them: Talos Linux on bare metal, KubeVirt for virtualization, Cilium for networking, and Ceph for storage. Gardener provides hosted control planes for the cloud layer. For the distributed, often air-gapped edge layer, KCP (Kubernetes Control Plane) handles fleet management across locations.

Because Talos Linux is free from shell access, imperative configuration, and build system complexity, the team found it supported their distributed edge at scale.

What their full talk on the TalosCon playlist.