Cloud Native Vienna: February 2026 Meetup

We'd like to invite you to our second installation for the Cloud Native Vienna Meetups in 2026!

Again we'll have two deep-dive talks and time to network and chat with friends in the Viennese cloud native community.

A big thank you to willhaben for hosting us and providing food and drinks! The meetup will take place at the willhaben (Landstraßer Hauptstraße 97/101, 1030 Wien).

Agenda:

• 17:30: Doors Open & Networking
• 17:55: Welcome from the Organizers
• 18:00: Talk 1: Lukas Zainzinger – willhaben’s Journey to AWS MSK – A retrospective on Security, Costs, and Reality
• 18:45: Break & Refreshments
• 19:00: Talk 2: David Hondl – Monster-Sized Gitops; How to scale Argo CD
• 19:45: Open Networking

We look forward to seeing you there!
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Talks:

Lukas Zainzinger (willhaben)
willhaben’s Journey to AWS MSK – A retrospective on Security, Costs, and Reality

Migrating to managed services is rarely a plug-and-play experience. In this talk, we walk through Willhaben’s transition to Managed Kafka on AWS (MSK), sharing the authentic story of our integration rather than a textbook tutorial.

We will dive into the specific hurdles we faced, focusing on how we engineered solutions for strict security and access control requirements. Additionally, we’ll discuss the financial aspect—specifically the pricing issues we encountered and the adjustments we made to solve them. This isn't a lecture on the "one right way" to do things, but a transparent look at the decisions, challenges, and learnings we gathered along our own journey.

Bio:
Lukas joined willhaben as a Platform SRE in 2024, following a career path that transitioned from Application Management to specialized DevOps roles at Raiffeisen Informatik, Shöpping and Siemens. Throughout his journey, he has developed a deep expertise in Kubernetes, Terraform and multiple Cloud Providers, always with an eye toward improving developer experience and system reliability. Currently a Master’s student at Hochschule Burgenland, Lukas bridges the gap between academic cloud research and real-world infrastructure challenges. He is particularly passionate about leveraging cloud-native and managed services to build robust, fault-tolerant infrastructure.

David Hondl (Dynatrace)
Monster-Sized Gitops; How to scale Argo CD

Argo CD is one of the most popular and widely spread GitOps tools for Kubernetes and part of the backbone of many internal developer platforms.

Also Argo CD can undoubtedly be a beast - and a huge one at that, as anyone scaling it for a production environment has probably seen in one way or another. But what if simply having a massive installation is not enough for us? What if we want to go even bigger from here, raise it to beyond what we thought feasible? Create more Applications, more ApplicationSets and render more resources at the same time?
These are the questions that we will tackle in this talk.

We are going to take a look at the different Argo CD components, from the frontend to the K8s controllers and how they behave at scale. We will examine how far they can bend and especially when and how they will break. Based on what we find, we are going to figure out how to tweak these parts in just the right way.
And in the end we will hopefully be able to turn Argo CD into a bigger monster than it ever was.

Bio:
I'm a Cloud Engineer at Dynatrace and I'm super passionate about all things Platform Engineering and the cloud-native community. I use (and build) platforms to create better developer experiences and love to share my knowledge as a speaker as well as actively organize meetups around the topic.