Cloud Native Computing Vienna

After the quiet time of the year, let's jump into 2026 with the first edition of the Cloud Native Vienna Meetup!

We are back with two deep-dive talks and plenty of time to reconnect with friends in the Viennese cloud native community.

A big thank you to Triscon for hosting us and providing food and drinks! The meetup will take place at the Impact Hub Vienna (Lindengasse 56, 1070 Vienna).

Agenda:

• 17:30: Doors Open & Networking
• 17:55: Welcome from the Organizers
• 18:00: Talk 1: Roman Ferstl – Break it till you make it - Pushing systems to their limits with load and performance testing
• 18:45: Break & Refreshments
• 19:00: Talk 2: Stephan Kraft & Philipp Bergsmann – Multi-factor authentication for Workload Identities w/ SPIFFE & SPIRE
• 19:45: Open Networking

We look forward to seeing you there!

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Talks:

Roman Ferstl (Triscon)
Break it till you make it - Pushing systems to their limits with load and performance testing

Every system has a breaking point. The trick is finding it before your users do. In this talk, Roman Ferstl explores how load and performance testing can be used not just as a checkbox activity, but as a detective’s toolkit for uncovering hidden bottlenecks, weak links, and unexpected system behaviors. Along the way, he will explain the key principles of effective load testing, demystify how the underlying tools actually work, and highlight widely used open-source and commercial options that attendees can try out themselves.

To bring these ideas to life, Roman will run a live demo in a cloud-native environment: flooding a Kubernetes cluster with load, watching pods scale up in real time, and observing what really happens when theory meets traffic. You’ll leave with both practical techniques and a front-row seat to systems pushed to their limits—and beyond.

Bio:
Roman Ferstl is the founder of Triscon, the go-to company for performance engineering. With an MSc in Astrophysics and a background as a software developer, Roman has always been drawn to solving complex problems. After several years in software engineering, he launched Triscon in 2018, building it into a well-established specialist in making systems faster, more reliable, and more resilient.

At Triscon, he and his team pioneer new approaches in performance monitoring and engineering—from automating test design to embedding performance tests seamlessly into CI/CD pipelines. Roman is particularly passionate about going beyond traditional load testing by leveraging modern observability solutions to uncover not just symptoms, but the true root causes of performance bottlenecks.

When systems bend under pressure, Roman enjoys being the detective who figures out why—and how to make them stronger.

Stefan Kraft & Philipp Bergsmann (RedHat)
Multi-factor authentication for Workload Identities w/ SPIFFE & SPIRE

Authentication only with username & password is simply not state of the art, some (EU) regulations even explicity asks for using at minimum a second factor. But what about workload identities? How can they be multi-factorized?

SPIFFE/SPIRE provides a proven, stable, hybrid-cloud capable solution for workloads to get authenticated w/o the hassle of managing secrets. In this talk, we will explain the architecture, discuss use-cases and show a live demo.

Bios:

Stephan has joined Red Hat 2019 as a Business Development Professional in Austria. He started his professional career as a Software Developer and later moved into Technical Sales, Solution Sales and Management. He was working for several companies in and around IT, particularly IBM and SWIFT. After a personal time-out, he has spent 3 years at universities as a program director of a Master and MBA program around Digital Transformation. This has lead him smoothly to Red Hat where he enjoys engaging with customers and partners around technical and cultural transformations.

Philipp is part of the EMEA OpenShift Black Belt team at Red Hat, focusing on the managed cloud offerings. He has worked in the IT industry for about 20 years in various roles, from development to cloud infrastructure consulting. Over the last few years, Philipp has worked extensively on Kubernetes-related topics, planning and implementing Kubernetes platforms with various local and international companies.

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.