Last week we had the privilege of presenting ORCHIDE at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam on 23 March 2026. Adèle Karam Hankache (Thales Alenia Space) and Sergiu Weisz (POLITEHNICA București) took to the stage with a talk titled "Bringing Cloud-Native PaaS to Space: Onboard Edge Computing for Satellites".
We shared how the New Space paradigm and cloud-native technologies are reshaping Earth Observation, moving from single-mission satellites with limited onboard processing towards flexible, multi-application platforms that process data directly in orbit. ORCHIDE answers this need with a complete Platform-as-a-Service for satellites: a ground system to develop, build and deploy applications, and an onboard orchestrator to run them on heterogeneous hardware.
The talk dived into the technical ecosystem the project has built:
- Unikernels with MirageOS and Unikraft for small, fast and secure application images.
- urunc, the open-source OCI runtime that lets unikernels run as if they were containers and plug straight into Kubernetes and its derivatives.
- ukAccel, an in-house component giving unikernels access to hardware accelerators such as GPUs, DPUs and FPGAs.
- K3s as the lightweight cloud-native orchestrator, paired with Argo Workflows, distributed storage and a Zot registry.
We closed with an end-to-end demonstration of the "Satellite as a Service" vision and a look ahead, from edge computing on a single satellite towards federated, multi-satellite systems with cross-satellite workload distribution.
The ORCHIDE project will be made available to the community as an open-source project — stay tuned and follow us to contribute to the journey!