Digital Sovereignty: Building Resilient, Portable, and Independent

THIS MEETUP WILL BE IN PERSON

What to expect:

• 🗣️ Two or Three speakers
• 👥 Meet old and new friends from the community
• 🍕 Free food
• 🎉 Open-end and free drinks afterwards
• ✔️ Just RSVP!

Agenda:

• 17:30 - Doors open
• 18:00 - Welcome
• 18:05 - 🗣️ Lukas Zainzinger - Escaping the Trap: A Pragmatic Approach on Decision Making to avoid Vendor Lock-In
• 18:50 - Break
• 19:00 - 🗣️ Roland Rittchen - OpenStack: From Sovereignty to Liberty
• 19:45 - 🎉 Open-end

🧑‍💻 Speakers:

Lukas Zaininger - Site Reliability Engineer at Willhaben
Escaping the Trap: A Pragmatic Approach on Decision Making to avoid Vendor Lock-In

Adopting third-party platforms and cloud-native services accelerates delivery, but it often comes with a hidden cost: vendor lock-in. When switching costs balloon and migration paths vanish, architectural agility suffers. How do you balance development velocity with long-term technological independence?
In this talk, I will break down a pragmatic, 2-step evaluation process used at willhaben to assess third-party solutions before writing a line of integration code. You’ll learn how to implement a practical Service Decision Matrix that quantifies service quality, operational complexity, and operation costs within a realistic vendor lock-in framework.

Roland Rittchen - Senior Platform Engineer at SQUER
OpenStack: From Sovereignty to Liberty

Europe has spent three years building sovereign cloud.
Regulators demand it, the European Commission
procures it, and a dozen providers now sell it. But
sovereignty answers a question about jurisdiction — and
it quietly leaves the harder one unanswered: if you can't
actually move, you aren't free. You've just changed who
owns you.

This talk takes the promise literally and tests it. One
OpenTofu repository, one Flux repository, three targets: a
self-hosted OpenStack cluster running on three mini PCs,
plus two European public clouds. We measure how much
genuinely transfers, find the places it leaks, and confront
the gap nobody puts on a landing page — European
providers have closed the infrastructure gap, and have
not closed the managed services gap

Further information: Digital sovereignty is often discussed from a regulatory or strategic perspective, but it increasingly affects day-to-day engineering decisions: architecture choices, cloud dependencies, identity management, infrastructure portability, security, and operational resilience.

Put simply: when your provider changes pricing, gets acquired, or falls out of your compliance scope; how painful is your exit? That pain is measured in the IAM, storage, and orchestration choices your team makes today. Sovereignty is ultimately about open standards and keeping your options open.

The meetup connects these perspectives by exploring practical questions:

• How do we design platforms that remain adaptable in a changing technology landscape?
• Where does vendor independence make sense, and where does it introduce unnecessary complexity?
• Which sovereignty topics are relevant for platform engineers today?