Federation

Running AI workloads on Kubernetes meant a new cluster every time a team had an idea, and for a long time every cluster came off a checklist: click through the console, run Terraform, finish with whatever commands you remembered. This article describes how T-Systems replaced that with a single file. Using Crossplane, a hub cluster turns a short, declarative Cluster object into a network, machines, DNS and certificate, secrets, monitoring and GPU support — and then keeps watching, repairing drift and retrying failed steps without anyone starting a pipeline. The first cluster took about 30 minutes, unattended. What followed mattered more: new clusters cost one file, test and production come from the same recipe, fixes land everywhere at once, and the same approach now provisions the applications, their databases and buckets, across two clouds.

T-Systems Connect & Integrate has been certified for the Product Carbon Footprint use case under the latest Catena-X Titan release, supporting standardized exchange of product-level carbon data according to PCF rulebook 4.0 and Catena-X standard CX-0136. As OEMs come to depend on reliable and traceable CO₂ information from their supply chains, suppliers need a practical way to provide it without building and operating dataspace infrastructure themselves. Delivered as a managed, cloud-agnostic service, Connect & Integrate covers the path from collecting and preparing carbon information through to securely sharing it with business partners — a step from isolated sustainability reporting toward interoperable Scope 3 and product-level carbon data chains. The certification adds to a portfolio spanning advisory, onboarding, connectivity and productive business applications, including Company Certificate Management and Traceability, positioning T-Systems as a single partner across the whole Catena-X journey. The capability is already in use, with T-Systems supporting Ford in connecting more than 70 suppliers worldwide to Catena-X.

Exchanging a certificate through Catena-X is only the first step. For automotive suppliers managing growing certificate portfolios, the real work lies in maintaining certificates across sites and business partners, monitoring expiry dates, tracking what has been published and acting on OEM responses. Connect & Integrate from T-Systems is evolving from a certificate exchange solution into an enterprise-ready certificate control system: a central cockpit for inventory and lifecycle activities, dedicated certificate and site views, a consolidated view of partner responses, site information drawn from Cofinity-X, and detailed technical logs when auditing is required. Combined with AI-assisted preparation already in production across hundreds of customers, it creates one connected journey from preparing certificate data to controlling what happens across the entire certificate lifecycle.