At OVHcloud, we believe the strongest skills are built through real-world experience. On 6 and 7 July 2026, through our OVHcloud Education Program, 86 students from Lille Ynov Campus took on a cloud security challenge our own teams deal with every day: securing a production Kubernetes cluster.
Two days, 12 teams, and an AI on bodyguard duty.
The challenge: what if AI could patch the flaws itself?
No theory, no textbook scenario. Third-year and Master’s students (Development, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure and Networks) were given a task drawn directly from the reality of our cloud environments: designing a GitOps audit and remediation chain on an OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes cluster.
The twist? Generative AI has moved beyond the role of assistant and is now an active part of the security chain. The loop, summed up in one line:
Detect a defect → AI analyses and proposes a fix → automatic Pull Request → human review → merge → Argo CD resynchronisation → corrected cluster
And they pulled it off in two days.
Just one constraint, though, and a big one: the entire stack had to be based on CNCF projects. The stack combined OVHcloud AI Endpoints for artificial intelligence with Argo CD, Trivy, Falco, Kyverno and Prometheus.
Two days to build skills, design a solution and defend it
Some participants were new to Kubernetes. Monday morning kicked off with a flash session that gave them what they needed, then the teams began work on architecture, development, technical decisions. All building towards Tuesday evening’s presentation: 10 minutes of live demonstration, 5 minutes of questions.
The evaluation wasn’t about knowing how to use every tool perfectly, but about the approach: how consistent the architecture was, the ability to collaborate under time pressure, and defending your choices to a panel of judges. That’s exactly what you’d expect from a production tech team.
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For two days, Aeddis and Loïc mentored the teams, joined by Matthieu and Youssef from Lille Ynov Campus’s mentoring team.
Their role: push back on approaches, share feedback from real-world experience, and above all, never give the game away.
What comes next?
This hackathon is part of our strategy to connect with schools, building genuine links between campuses and cloud careers. Our employees pass on their expertise. Students get a first look at the technologies and challenges they’ll come across during internships, work placements, or their first jobs.
A big thank you to Lille Ynov Campus, to Matthieu and Youssef for supervising, to Aeddis and Loïc for mentoring, and especially, the 86 students for their enthusiasm and hard work. We can’t wait to do it all again!
Keen to take on cloud security challenges like this day in, day out? Discover our internship and work-study opportunities, plus all our other tech roles.