Case Study: Nokia scales a secure global private cloud with Sidero Labs’ Talos Linux

How Nokia runs one of the world's largest private clouds on Talos Linux

Nokia, a global telecommunications and IT company, faced significant challenges in scaling its massive private cloud, the Nokia Enterprise and Services Cloud (NESC). As the platform grew to 11,000 servers, its legacy operating systems became a bottleneck, introducing security risks and complexity that hindered the delivery of a managed Kubernetes service at scale. Nokia needed a minimal, secure, and API-driven operating system designed specifically for Kubernetes to meet its strict requirements.

Sidero Labs provided its Talos Linux operating system, a minimal and API-driven OS built for Kubernetes. This solution enabled Nokia to achieve full automation, consistency, and security across its global data centers. The implementation was a major success: Nokia now runs 320 Kubernetes clusters on 130,000 cores with a drastically reduced attack surface. This led to a 1300% increase in core count without added complexity and reduced their total cost of operations to roughly one-third the cost of equivalent public cloud services.

Nokia

Janne Heino

Head Of Global Services Cloud Architecture