BruhnBruhn Innovation announces Dacreo apto: Europe’s first Kubernetes-compatible spacestack

Uppsala, Sweden, August 7, 2025

BruhnBruhn Innovation has announced Dacreo apto, a patent-pending Kubernetes-compatible spacestack for cloud-native operations in orbit. Validated on state-of-the-art space computing hardware and designed from the ground up for the demands of the space environment, Dacreo apto is the first European spacestack of its kind.

The announcement marks the culmination of sustained development work combining expertise from edge computing, embedded systems, cloud infrastructure, aviation, railway, robotics, and space engineering. Dacreo apto makes it possible for mission teams to deploy, update, and recover containerised applications on space hardware using the same DevOps tools and workflows they use on Earth.

The problem Dacreo apto solves

As satellite constellations grow and sensor capabilities advance, the volume of data generated in orbit is outpacing the capacity of ground-centric architectures to handle it. Missions increasingly need to process data where it is generated, aboard the spacecraft, and transmit only the results. At the same time, the software lifecycle of a satellite has historically been slow, difficult, and high risk. Updates are complex, failures are hard to recover from, and the tools that terrestrial cloud teams take for granted simply do not exist in orbit.

Deploying standard Kubernetes on space hardware does not close this gap. Cosmic ray bit-flips can corrupt running containers without triggering a process crash. Clock drift breaks TLS connections. A failed update can leave a spacecraft unrecoverable thousands of kilometres from the nearest engineer. These are not edge cases. They are routine conditions in the space environment.

Dacreo apto addresses all of them at the platform level, so mission teams do not have to.

What Dacreo apto delivers

At its core, Dacreo apto gives mission teams a complete GitOps workflow for space. Developers commit Helm charts or Kustomize overlays to a standard Git repository. The cluster in orbit reconciles, validates, and deploys. One git push from ground to orbit.

The platform is built on Dacreo OS, an immutable Yocto 5.0-based Linux distribution with a read-only, cryptographically verified root filesystem. A separate writable data partition isolates mutable workloads. Atomic A/B updates are signed with X.509 cryptography and validated before activation. If validation fails, the system rolls back automatically to the last known-good state. A dedicated factory recovery partition handles worst-case scenarios without physical access.

A Space Manager microservice monitors running services for anomalous behaviour, including silent computation errors caused by radiation effects that would not trigger a standard process crash. It enables autonomous detection, restart, and quarantine of affected workloads between contact windows. The Dacreo AI Foundation provides a pre-integrated AMD ROCm compute environment across GPU, NPU, and FPGA, so application developers inherit a validated acceleration stack without building or maintaining it themselves.

For data handling across intermittent links, Dacreo apto includes transparent S3-compatible synchronisation between orbit and ground. An optional CCSDS Space Packet Protocol microservice provides backwards compatibility with legacy telemetry systems, making spacecraft data endpoints addressable by standard cloud tooling with no special adaptations required.

Validated on the world’s most capable space computer

Dacreo apto was validated end-to-end on Blue Marble Communications’ Space Edge Processor, which integrates AMD 4nm APU technology with Xilinx Versal FPGA fabrics, dual 10GbE payload interfaces, and dual 100GbE optical interfaces within a sub-100W envelope. Dr. Fredrik Bruhn personally oversaw integration and testing at Blue Marble Communications’ laboratory in California, running heavy workloads and verifying seamless operation of the BMCnet network driver across link interruptions.

The platform also supports the AMD V1000 series and other CPU architectures, giving mission designers flexibility across a range of space-grade hardware configurations.

Partners and acknowledgements

Dacreo apto was developed in strategic partnership with Netnod, whose secure and resilient networking architecture contributed directly to the platform’s cloud-native foundation. Financial support was provided by the Swedish National Space Agency. CCSDS and ECSS-PUS library support and training is provided by 12G Flight Systems.

“Connecting ground and space through cloud-native workflows is our vision. Seeing our spacestack thrive under the harshest conditions proves that software-defined infrastructure is key to the next era of space services.” — Dr. Fredrik Bruhn, CTO, BruhnBruhn Innovation

What comes next

Less than three weeks after this announcement, Dacreo apto was validated in orbit. On 24 July 2025, a containerised AI pipeline deployed via Dacreo apto ran aboard the International Space Station, reducing a 1.5 GB satellite image scene to a 75 kB mission product in seconds. Read the full account of that demonstration in the case study below.

Getting started

BBI offers edge development kits with pre-configured AMD APU hardware and pre-loaded Dacreo apto images for local prototyping and testing before orbital deployment. Virtual lab environments provide Docker and VM-based emulation of the full spacestack including the ROCm AI Foundation, Kubernetes control plane, and simulated CCSDS links for CI integration and continuous testing. Software licensing, training, and professional services are available for teams moving toward mission deployment.

Read the case study

For a detailed account of Dacreo apto running in orbit aboard the ISS, including the full demonstration results, read the case study.