Platform

The sovereign supply chain for classified Kubernetes.

Northfleet is a Canadian-incorporated Kubernetes supply chain vendor supplying the bundle protocol, attestation chain, and audit trail that cleared engineering teams apply to their Protected B and Secret clusters. The customer operates the cluster; Northfleet supplies the supply chain.

overview

From build to apply

What Northfleet ships, in 68 seconds.

Capabilities

Four pillars. One platform.

Each pillar is built to the same standard: Canadian-jurisdictional supply chain, accreditation-ready evidence, deployable to existing cleared environments without rip-and-replace.

  1. 01

    Sovereign supply chain

    Every artifact entering a classified cluster bundled, signed, verified, and applied under Canadian jurisdiction. Artifacts are signed with the customer's keys and verified offline against the customer's own trust root, with no remote service in the verification path. The customer's cleared engineering teams operate the cluster on upstream Kubernetes; Northfleet supplies the supply chain.

  2. 02

    Hardened artifact attestation

    Every artifact entering the trust path is signed, attested, and accompanied by a verifiable bill of materials. Inspectable end to end. Auditable by your security team without privileged access to Northfleet.

  3. 03

    Air-gap operations

    A productized one-way transfer protocol with attestation chain and tamper-evident audit trail. Designed for classified facilities where the high-side environment has never seen the internet, and never will.

  4. 04

    Accreditable compliance and audit

    ITSP.10.033 controls mapped to Northfleet's capabilities. Evidence collection built in, required in Protected B mode, and ready for accreditation review. The evidence is emitted on the customer's infrastructure as each change lands; the cleared engineering teams that operate the cluster sign off.

Sovereignty model

Canadian vendor. Customer-held keys. No foreign authority over the customer's trust path.

Northfleet is incorporated in Canada. Procurement contracts with a Canadian counterparty subject to Canadian law. The customer runs the signing path, the attestation chain, and the audit log on its own infrastructure, under its own keys, and verifies offline against its own trust root, with no remote service in the verification path. Northfleet holds no customer data and no customer signing keys, and the architecture assumes the vendor itself can be compromised or compelled. Compelling Northfleet does not produce a silent backdoor.

Northfleet's tooling works alongside what your engineering team has already built. There is no rip-and-replace. Existing tooling and existing operators continue to work. Each bundle targets a single application on a single cluster, so adoption can begin with one workload.

The substrate is upstream Kubernetes. Anything Northfleet ships is designed so a cleared engineer can verify it without reaching for Northfleet-supplied tooling.

Deployment surfaces

Where it runs.

  • On premises

    Departmental data centres and prime-operated classified facilities. The default for Secret workloads.

  • Sovereign cloud

    Canadian-owned, Canadian-operated cloud regions, region-locked, with no cross-border data flows and no foreign-jurisdiction parent.

  • Hybrid estates

    Build and staging on Canadian commercial cloud; production on premises. The air-gap layer carries deployments across the classification boundary.

Accreditation posture

Designed for accreditation from the first commit.

Canadian classified procurement now runs on ITSP.10.033, the Cyber Centre's 2026 replacement for the ITSG-33 control catalogue. Northfleet is structured around the controls procurement actually requires: access, audit, configuration management, identification and authentication, and system communications. Auditor-ready evidence is built in, not an add-on.

CCCS guidance and CSE technical bulletins shape the default policy posture. Departments with stricter overlays bring their own policy, and verification checks against it before anything is applied.

Boundaries

What Northfleet is not.

The shape of Northfleet is defined as much by what it refuses to be as by what it ships.

  • Not a Kubernetes distribution.

    Northfleet runs on upstream Kubernetes. Defence procurement is allergic to vendor-specific control planes that drift from CNCF conformance, and rightly so.

  • Not a managed-services vendor.

    Northfleet supplies the trust path and operates none of it. The customer's cleared engineering teams operate the cluster, as they already do. There is no Northfleet operator with kubeconfig access to a customer environment.

  • Not a Red Hat reseller.

    OpenShift is a fine product under foreign jurisdiction. That is the gap Northfleet exists to close, not narrow.

  • Not a generic cloud.

    Northfleet exists for one reality: Canadian jurisdiction, cleared engineering teams, classified workloads. Everything outside that is out of scope.

  • Not consumer SaaS.

    There is no self-serve sign-up. Procurement begins with a conversation with the people who will be on the line for the deployment.

Field notes

Recent field notes

  1. Sep 18, 2026

    Already in the rulebook

    In Strasbourg the Prime Minister said supply chains have become vulnerabilities to exploit. The Cyber Centre had already written that into the Protected B rulebook. What its three new requirements ask of the chain that moves software into an enclave.

  2. Aug 26, 2026

    Who holds the switch

    The August collapse of Canada-US trade talks was another click of an eighteen-month ratchet. What the pattern means for the technology Canada's institutions run on, and the question to ask at every link of a classified delivery chain.

  3. Jul 07, 2026

    A procurement checklist for the sovereign Kubernetes supply chain

    Fifteen criteria for any vendor in the trust path of a classified Kubernetes deployment: the question to ask in an RFP, the evidence that answers it, and the red flag that fails it. The closing essay in the series.

All field notes

Next

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The architecture brief covers protocol, threat model, attestation chain, and accreditation mapping. It is shared after a first conversation with engineering and procurement leads who will be on the line for the deployment.

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