Sovereignty in Practice

Two exciting topics, three very experienced speakers and much networking opportunity. We are very much looking forward to the next DevOps Meetup Zurich.
Here's what's planned for the evening:
17:30 - 18:00 - Arrival and first drinks
18:00 - 18:45 - From DevOps to Digital Sovereignty: What the 2026 Study Reveals by Markus Speth & Romano Roth
18:45 - 19:30 -From DevOps to Digital Sovereignty: How a Movement Became a Platform by Syrian Hadad
19:30 - 20:30 - Networking, Open Space & More drinks*

From DevOps to Digital Sovereignty: What the 2026 Study Reveals
DevOps, Platform Engineering, and Cloud-Native have transformed how organizations build and run digital services. But in 2026, the conversation has clearly shifted: it is no longer only about speed, automation, and developer experience. It is increasingly about control, accountability, resilience, and long-term freedom of action.
In this session, we present the results of the Sovereignty in Practice Study 2026. The study explores how organizations make real-world decisions about data, workloads, providers, governance, and operating models — especially under regulatory, legal, and geopolitical pressure.
You will see where organizations are consciously accepting dependencies, where they are trying to reduce them, and where the gap between strategy and operational reality is still large. We will also connect the findings back to the DevOps world: what digital sovereignty means in practice for platform teams, cloud choices, architecture, and day-to-day delivery.

Markus Speth
Markus Speth is a Partner at VSHN, where he works across Marketing, Communications & People. With a background in business administration and marketing, he focuses on building strong communities, communicating complex technology topics, and shaping the company’s brand and culture.

He is particularly passionate about digital sovereignty and digital transformation, open ecosystems, and the role of open source in enabling independence and resilience for organizations and society.

Romano Roth
Romano Roth is Global Chief of Cybernetic Transformation at Zühlke, with over two decades of experience in platform engineering, AI integration, and enterprise transformation. He helps organizations become adaptive, AI-augmented enterprises and also shares his expertise as a lecturer, author, and community leader in the DevOps space.

From DevOps to Digital Sovereignty: How a Movement Became a Platform
IT in the public sector is anything but simple: long-established landscapes, strict regulatory requirements, complex processes, and often more than 500 business applications that must be operated reliably.
For a long time, this meant ordering individual servers, databases, DNS entries, firewall rules, and storage, then assembling everything manually. Every application was unique. Pets instead of cattle.
This talk tells the story of how the DevOps idea took hold in exactly this environment — first as a cultural movement, and later as a concrete operating and architectural model. Step by step, individual infrastructure evolved into a platform, manual work into automation, and isolated solutions into standardization.
The result: the Aargau Cloud Platform and a dedicated platform engineering team. In an environment shaped by legacy systems, federal structures, and long lifecycle expectations, platform thinking becomes the foundation for digital sovereignty: maintaining control, reducing dependencies, and still staying innovative — without simply handing everything over to others.

Syrian Hadad
Syrian Hadad is a CTO and long-standing technology and platform leader in the public sector. Among other achievements, he built the Aargau Cloud Platform and helped establish DevOps, cloud, and architecture topics strategically within the organization. Together with the IT organization of the Canton of Aargau, he won the 2023 Digital Economy Award (Digital Excellence) for the consistent transformation toward platforms, cloud-native technologies, and modern governance.

Many thanks to our sponsors:

• Catering Sponsor: DevOpsDays Zürich https://www.devopsdays.ch/
• Location Sponsor: Digicomp https://www.digicomp.ch/

* contact us min. 3 days prior to the event if you prefer a vegan option.