On September 29th, 2026, Aarno Aukia took the stage in Vienna to make a simple argument: you don’t get sovereignty by signing a contract with a hyperscaler. You get it by architecting for it.

Cloud Native Days Austria 2026

Cloud Native Days Austria brought the community together again on September 29th and 30th, 2026, this time in two cinema halls at Cineplexx Wienerberg in Vienna. Two days of talks, hallway conversations and an evening event, aimed at developers, platform engineers and everyone else who runs things on Kubernetes.

We were there and our co-founder and partner Aarno Aukia opened the technical program on day one, right after the opening keynote.

Short on time? Download the slides (PDF) and jump straight into the deck.

Aarno’s Talk: “Data Sovereignty Is Built, Not Bought”

Aarno started with the deal the hyperscalers have been offering for twenty years. The offer: modern managed services – databases, queues, AI – self-service, in minutes. The price: your data moves into their datacenter, and the jurisdiction follows the provider. Or, as Aarno put it: the law follows the provider, not the rack. An executive order can switch your service off. The CLOUD Act can make your data be handed over.

Data has gravity

For many organizations, moving everything into a hyperscaler was never really an option anyway. Health, finance and public-sector data has to stay in controlled environments. Workloads need to stay close to the systems they talk to. And large datasets don’t move on a project timeline. Meanwhile, developers expect exactly what the cloud promises: a managed database, self-service, now.

Mohammad Alavi, CTO of Health Info Net (HIN), the secure network for Swiss healthcare, summed up the stakes: “No financial compensation could ever make up for leaked medical information.”

The common mistake

The reflex answer is: “Let’s move it to a sovereign cloud.” That usually gets you a migration project, a duplicated platform and a new dependency. You changed whom you depend on, not whether you depend.

Aarno pointed to the EU’s EUR 180 million cloud tender from April 2026, the first one scored on sovereignty. Three winners reached SEAL-3, meaning they cannot be blocked by a non-EU third party. Another bidder, offering EU-operated infrastructure built on Google Cloud, landed at SEAL-2. The label said sovereign. The score did not.

Sovereignty as three tests

Instead of trusting labels, Aarno proposed three concrete questions:

• Location: Can you move where it runs without changing how developers consume it? Provider-specific Terraform fails this test, a Kubernetes service claim passes.
• Operator: Can you replace who runs it without replacing the technology? A hyperscaler’s managed database fails, an open-source operator with its config in Git passes.
• Vendor: Can you replace the software without rebuilding? This one needs open source. VMware after Broadcom is the cautionary tale – Redis to Valkey in eight days is the counterexample.

Sovereignty, in short, is what you can still replace tomorrow.

The neutral platform layer

The architecture that passes all three tests puts one platform API between developers and infrastructure. Developers talk to the API; underneath, it can be Cloud A, Cloud B, a private datacenter or the edge. The point isn’t to avoid platforms, it’s to design for change.

That’s exactly how our VSHN Application Catalog (AppCat) works. Developers order managed databases and services as Kubernetes resources. Crossplane on Kubernetes provides the service API, and the services run at cloudscale, Exoscale, Switch or in private clusters – each with its own local Prometheus and Grafana, operated 24/7 where the data is.

Today, AppCat offers PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Redis, Keycloak (with Inventage), Forgejo, Nextcloud and S3 object storage from the underlying infrastructure. Kafka (with Spoud) and OpenBao (with bespinian) are coming next.

A production database takes ten lines:

yaml

apiVersion: vshn.appcat.vshn.io/v1
kind: VSHNPostgreSQL
metadata:
  name: pgsql-app1-prod
spec:
  parameters:
    size:
      plan: standard-2
  writeConnectionSecretToRef:
    name: postgres-creds

No cloud, no region, no operator, no storage class. What comes back is PostgreSQL with TLS, daily backups, monitoring and a maintenance window. A real production team sets more – service level, three instances for high availability, backup schedule and retention, maintenance window, deletion protection. Every one of those is a decision the team owns. And still nothing in the spec says where it runs.

2,000+ instances in production

AppCat isn’t a concept. It has delivered more than 2,000 managed instances since 2021, in two ways: every Managed OpenShift cluster we run includes it by default – in the customer’s own infrastructure, VMware included, or at a Swiss partner like cloudscale, with SLAs up to 99.99%. And in shared environments, you order AppCat services like SaaS through Servala or use them built into APPUiO.

Customers include finnova, acrevis, HRM Systems, the Swiss Federal Archives, HIN with its 50,000+ healthcare professionals, and Taurus. Sebastien Pasche, VP Engineering at Taurus: “We reduced monthly incidents from twelve to zero and improved our SLA from 99% to 100%.”

Proof: we change the engine, the API stays

The strongest part of the talk: we pass the tests ourselves. In AppCat, kind: VSHNPostgreSQL stayed the same while the PostgreSQL operator underneath was swapped: CloudNativePG became available as an option in September 2025, matured with self-service restore in April 2026, became the default for new instances in May 2026, and StackGres reached end of life on August 31st, 2026. Customers kept their API and planned migrations on their own timeline.

And we’re doing it again, this time with our own control plane. AppCat has run on Crossplane since 2021 and will continue into 2027 and beyond, but we’re moving to Helmetica, an operations framework for any software on Kubernetes that we’re open-sourcing over time. It monitors, backs up and GitOps-manages every service – the same principle as our Puppet framework on VMs. The difference is striking: Redis on Crossplane needed 2,076 lines of Go and shell code to render a Helm chart. Redis on Helmetica takes 320 lines – the upstream chart plus the framework’s shared templates for backup, network, maintenance and credentials. From Helm chart to service in five minutes and every change is a diff you can read.

Sovereignty is now measurable

The EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework scores providers on eight objectives, from SEAL-0 to SEAL-4. Three of them – operational independence, supply chain transparency and the ability to migrate without rebuilding – add up to half the score. And all three are decided by your architecture, not your contract.

Aarno closed with the question that sums it up: The question isn’t which cloud you choose, but whether your architecture still gives you a choice tomorrow. Dependent teams ask for permission. Sovereign teams ship.

In short: data sovereignty is built, not bought.

Get the slides

Want to dig into the details – the three sovereignty tests, the AppCat architecture, the YAML examples and the Helmetica comparison? Download Aarno’s full slide deck from Cloud Native Days Austria as a PDF.

Sovereignty was everywhere

We weren’t the only ones talking about it. Sovereignty, independence and compliance ran through the whole program:

• Lukas Zainzinger (willhaben) presented a blueprint for reclaiming data sovereignty with an open-source, vendor-agnostic data pipeline from edge to cloud.
• Niels Claeys (Dataminded) asked what a cloud strategy looks like after the hyperscaler era, from fully on-prem platforms to sovereign control planes and EU cloud alternatives.
• Dr. Constanze Roedig showed an eBPF-based Kubernetes SOC that runs node-local and can be airgapped, so no data has to leave the cluster.
• ORF shared how they connect EKS to on-prem hardware with hybrid nodes, Cilium and Crossplane.
• Artem Lajko and Nick Berthold (iits-consulting) looked behind the curtain of managed Kubernetes with Gardener, Kamaji and Cluster API.
• On the regulatory side, talks on the EU Cyber Resilience Act and NIS2 in Austria made it clear that compliance is becoming an engineering topic, not just a legal one.

Different angles, same conclusion: the community is no longer asking whether sovereignty matters, but how to build it. That’s exactly the conversation we want to be part of.

Thank you, Vienna

A big thank you to the organizers, volunteers and sponsors of Cloud Native Days Austria for another great edition and to everyone who came by to talk sovereignty, Crossplane and managed services with us.

Want to know how this model could work in your environment? Get in touch – we’re happy to show you.

VSHN is now an official MariaDB partner. To mark it properly and to give teams already running MariaDB (or considering it) something hands-on, we’re hosting a technical workshop at the VSHN Tower in Zürich, with Michael “Monty” Widenius, the creator of MySQL and MariaDB, joining in person.

When: Monday, October 19, 1:30 PM – 5:00 PM (CEST)
Where: VSHN Tower, Neugasse 6, Zürich
Seats: Limited to 40

This is a hands-on technical session, not a sales pitch. VSHN and MariaDB engineers will walk through what MariaDB Enterprise actually adds on top of Community, and what that looks like running in production, live, not in slides.

What we’ll cover

• A live demo of MaxScale failover and read-write splitting, paired with Enterprise Monitor for visibility into what’s actually happening under the hood
• A walkthrough of MariaDB Cloud, including AI agents, managed deployment, and how BYOA and BYOC let you bring your own cloud account or provider, including sovereign and non-hyperscaler clouds, into the picture
• Where AI is heading for databases: RAG, vector search, and what “AI-native” actually means at the data layer, alongside a look at the current state of open source
• Monty Widenius on migrations, the MariaDB roadmap, and the wider ecosystem, drawing on two decades of building the database many of you already run

Why this matters now

MariaDB Community deployments tend to grow organically, useful until they’re business-critical, at which point questions about support, patching, licensing, and operational risk stop being optional. This workshop is for the people who actually run these systems: a chance to see what closes the gap between “it works” and “it’s operated properly,” and to ask the engineers building it directly.

About Michael “Monty” Widenius, CTO & Co-Founder, MariaDB

Monty has written 95 percent of the server code in MySQL, the predecessor to MariaDB and was previously co-founder at SkySQL, and the CTO of MySQL AB until its sale to Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). Monty was also the founder of TCX DataKonsult AB, a Swedish data warehousing company. Monty was selected as one of the 100 most influential persons in the Finnish IT market and now devotes his time to product development, attending conferences and educating developers.

Bring your questions

Got something specific you want covered, on MaxScale, MariaDB Cloud, migrations, or anything else? Let us know when you register, and we’ll make sure it’s on the table. The session closes with open Q&A, and there’s an Apéro afterwards with plenty of time to talk shop.

Register now for Monday, October 19, 1:30 PM – 5:00 PM at the VSHN Tower, Zürich

Yesterday we hosted our Cloud Native Computing Switzerland Meetup at the VSHNtower in Zürich – the latest edition in a series that has been running for nearly a decade now, with over 3,000 members and more than 50 meetups behind us.

It shows: the group currently holds a 4.6 rating from 338 reviews on Meetup, and yesterday’s edition was another good reminder why people keep coming back. Nice people, great talks, and good conversations over the apéro afterwards.

Thank you to our speakers

Benjamin Koltermann (cenroq AG) – How to: securing your clusters. A hands-on look at how Kubernetes clusters can be attacked despite seemingly secure configurations, and how to close those gaps.

Download slides

Chris Bingham (CTO Switzerland, Fujitsu) – Paddelbuch – How Kiro Changed the Game. An update on paddelbuch.ch, the serverless geospatial system for the Swiss paddle sports community, and how an unexpected conversation at AWS re:Invent 2025 reshaped its technical foundation.

Download slides

Christian Blättler (zeitlos.software) – A swiss, cloud-native Alternative to Vercel and Heroku. A deep dive into Lucity, his open-source take on Vercel/Heroku-style developer experience, built on standard Kubernetes and Helm, with “ejectability” as a hard design constraint.

Download slides

Three very different talks, all tied together by the same cloud-native spirit – and plenty of good discussion in the breaks and afterwards at the apéro.

Talk videos

Videos of all talks are on our YouTube channel: vshn.tv – subscribe to get notified.

Next up: November Meetup at Open Systems

Our next CNC Meetup takes place on November 17, 2026, hosted by Open Systems AG in Zürich. We’re still looking for speakers – if you’ve got a cloud-native project, tool, or story worth sharing, submit your talk proposal at cnc-meetup.ch. We’d love to have you on stage.

Update, September 22: Two VSHNeers are now speaking at DINAcon 2026 – see below for details on Tobias’s and Aarno’s talks.

On Wednesday, November 18, 2026, the Swiss digital sustainability community meets again at the Kongresszentrum Bern, for another edition of DINAcon. And this year VSHN isn’t just attending, we’re the Apéro Sponsor.

Why we keep coming back

DINAcon is the only conference in Switzerland dedicated entirely to digital sustainability, organized by the nonprofit association CH Open, of which VSHN has long been a member. It brings together people from IT, public administration, politics and civil society who care about the same question we do: how do we make sure digital infrastructure serves people over the long term, not just the next quarter.

We were there the last years too, and it’s exactly this mix that keeps drawing us back: fewer sales pitches, more real conversations about data protection, open source and digital sovereignty with the people actually shaping policy and practice in Switzerland.

Two VSHN talks, back to back

This year we’re also bringing two speakers to the Hodler Souveränität stage, right after each other.

Tobias Brunner – Furniture, Not Lumber: What Sausages, Furniture and Airplanes Have to Do with Digital Sovereignty (14:10-14:30, English)
Tobias takes an unusual route into a familiar problem: why buying cloud services in Europe and Switzerland still feels so different from buying them at a hyperscaler, even when the underlying stack is open source. Expect sausages, furniture and airplanes as unlikely teachers, and a fresh answer to “but it’s all open source, so what’s the problem?”

Aarno Aukia – Sovereignty Is More Than Data Residency: Eight Dimensions for Sustainable Digital Infrastructure (14:35-14:55, German)
Aarno picks up right where Tobias leaves off. Building on the European Commission’s new Cloud Sovereignty Framework, he breaks digital sovereignty down into eight measurable dimensions, from ownership and jurisdiction to supply chain transparency and environmental impact, and turns them into a practical checklist Swiss organizations can actually use for procurement, architecture and open-source strategy decisions.

Together, the two talks make a nice arc: Tobias on why the sovereignty gap exists and feels the way it does, Aarno on how to measure and close it.

Sponsoring the apéro this year

This time around, we’re stepping up as Apéro Sponsor. Once the last talks wrap up, the conference moves into the evening apéro, and VSHN is covering the drinks. It’s a small thing, but it’s exactly the kind of moment where the best conversations happen: hallway chats turning into real discussions over a glass of wine.

Look out for our logo on site and come find us at the bar. If you’re happy with your drink, you’ll know who to thank. 🙂

What’s on the programme

DINAcon 2026 expects more than 300 participants and over 35 talks across four focus areas: AI, public administration, mobility, and sustainable digitalization. The keynote lineup includes Gina Plat from the Open Source Program Office of the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, Florian Dieminger, Senior Engineering Manager at Firefox Enterprise, and Alexander Smolianitski, Head of Open Source Products at Germany’s Zentrum Digitale Souveränität (ZenDiS).

If you’ve been following the digital sovereignty debate, that lineup will look familiar. It’s the same conversation running through most of the events we’ve been part of this year, and it’s exactly the kind of company we want to keep.

Get your ticket

Tickets are available via Eventfrog.

See you in Bern on November 18. Look for our logo and talk to us!

VSHN has been organising the Cloud Native Computing Switzerland meetup for nearly a decade now. What started as a small group of people trying to make sense of cloud-native technologies and Kubernetes has grown into one of the largest cloud-native communities in the country: over 3,000 members, more than 50 meetups, and a steady stream of people who show up for the talks and stay for the apéros.

The next edition happens on Tuesday, 15 September 2026 at the VSHNtower in Zürich. Register on Meetup while there is still room.

What the meetup is – and what it is not

The CNC Meetup is a neutral place for the Swiss tech community, not an event for sales pitches. We at VSHN, or other companies, provide the room and the apéro and take care of the logistics. The stage, however, belongs to everyone who has something worthwhile to contribute about running things in production. Our speakers so far have come from startups, banks and universities, from cloud providers and from one-person open-source projects.

Entry is free, everyone is welcome from complete newcomers to CNCF maintainers, and the talks are recorded and published on vshn.tv so the content outlives the evening.

Three talks on Tuesday, 15 September 2026

How to: securing your clusters by Benjamin Koltermann (cenroq AG) takes the attacker’s perspective. Everyone wants secure Kubernetes clusters, hardly anyone really achieves it. Benjamin shows how clusters get compromised despite configurations that look solid on paper, and how you can find those gaps before somebody else does.

Paddelbuch: How Kiro Changed the Game by Chris Bingham, CTO Switzerland at Fujitsu, continues a story he started here in 2024: paddelbuch.ch, a serverless geographic information system for the Swiss paddle sports community. Then Kiro came along, and an unexpected conversation at re:Invent 2025 completely changed its technical foundation.

A swiss, cloud-native alternative to Vercel and Heroku by Christian Blättler (zeitlos.software) goes deep into Lucity, his open-source PaaS built on standard Kubernetes and Helm with one hard constraint: you can eject at any time. No database of its own, no CRDs, the entire state is derived from Kubernetes. Ejecting therefore means downloading a Helm chart instead of running a data migration.

All abstracts and the detailed timetable are on the event page.

Practical details

When: Tuesday, 15 September 2026, 15:00 to 18:00, doors open at 14:30 Where: VSHNtower, Neugasse 6, 8005 Zürich Cost: Free, apéro included Register: on Meetup

Our event space has a limited capacity and the last few editions filled up quite quickly, so better register today. And if you have registered but cannot make it, please cancel your registration. That frees up your slot for someone on the waiting list. The recordings land on vshn.tv afterwards, and we will add them to this post once they are online.

We expect all participants to follow VSHN’s Conference Code of Conduct.

Want to speak or sponsor?

Nearly a decade of meetups only happens because people keep volunteering to stand in front of the room. If you are working on something cloud-native and want to talk about it, or if your company would like to sponsor a future edition: send us your idea at cnc-meetup.ch. We are always looking for interesting talks!

On September 17, the Swiss Cloud Native community heads up the Gurten again, for the sixth edition of the Swiss Cloud Native Day. And as in previous years, VSHN is on the sponsor list. We wouldn’t want to miss it.

Why we keep coming back

The Cloud Native Day is not a trade show. It’s organized by the nonprofit association bernerit.rocks, carried by a lot of voluntary work and made for the people who actually run these technologies in production. 250 participants, one day, two tracks, and a funicular up the mountain. Show your conference ticket and the ride on the Gurtenbahn is free.

It’s exactly this mix of engineers, hallway conversations and good mountain air that makes an event we’re glad to support. That’s why we’re back as a sponsor.

Come and see us at our booth

You’ll find the VSHN team at our booth in the Uptown area, right next to one of the two session rooms. Drop by between talks, have a coffee with us and tell us what you’re building.

Good reasons to stop by:

• You run Kubernetes and want to compare notes on the unspectacular parts: upgrades, backups, on-call, day two.
• You’re curious how we operate managed services on Swiss infrastructure, for customers who care where their data lives.
• You just want to say hi to the people behind the VSHN logo. That’s just as welcome. 🙂

Our talk

VSHN also has a sponsor talk at the conference. We’ll announce time, room and topic closer to the event, so take a look at the schedule or simply ask us at the booth.

If you follow the sovereignty debate in Swiss IT, you’ll quickly notice that it runs through this year’s entire programme: confidential computing, the paradox of cloud sovereignty, supply chain security. A good year to have that conversation in person.

It’s also the question behind Servala, the sovereign app store we’ve been building since 2025. What that looks like in practice, and where it still falls short, is something we’re happy to discuss with you at the booth.

And then there’s the evening

The day ends at 17:45 with the closing session, followed by drinks and a party in the Pavillon until 22:00. Bern, a mountain, and the Cloud Native community in good spirits. If you stay only for the talks, you’re missing half of it.

Get your ticket

Tickets are available at cloudnativeday.ch. The organizers also offer discounted tickets for people who contribute to the conference’s diversity or have a lower income. A short message to tickets@cloudnativeday.ch is enough.

See you on the Gurten on September 17. Look out for the Uptown area, the coffee and our logo.

At the Open Source in Finance Forum London 2026, I took the stage to share lessons from operating a regulated digital asset platform on open, cloud-native infrastructure. The talk was part of the Fluxnova & Platform Automation track and ran on Thursday, June 25, 2026.

The talk

Operating Digital Asset Platforms on Open Infrastructure: Lessons From Regulated Production

Digital asset platforms operate under demanding conditions: strict security requirements, high availability expectations, and increasing regulatory scrutiny. At the same time, engineering teams need to retain the flexibility to evolve their systems as the digital asset ecosystem keeps developing. This was a real-life use case: what worked for us, and what didn’t.

You can find the full slide deck here.

The full recording of the talk is available here.

Two worlds that don’t normally talk to each other

I opened by explaining why I’m the one telling this story. I’ve lived the same tension from two different angles: highly regulated healthcare on one side, fluid open-source ecosystems on the other. Digital asset platforms sit exactly at that intersection – regulated discipline meets open-source speed.

Why digital assets are a different operational challenge

Three pressures make this space harder than typical cloud-native infrastructure:

• Digital assets are bearer instruments – downtime doesn’t just mean a bad SLA, it means real money at risk.
• The regulatory ground keeps moving: FINMA today in Switzerland, MiCA rolling out across Europe.
• The asset universe itself keeps expanding – from crypto to tokenized securities to NFTs to CBDCs – and the platform has to evolve without breaking what’s already live.

As one of our partners, Taurus, put it: “We run on OpenShift, they run on OpenShift – we speak the same language.”

Three patterns we see across regulated financial infrastructure

Pattern 1: Stable core, agile edge. The clearest example is acrevis Bank, where a proven, regulated core banking system (Finnova) stays untouched, while a cloud-native layer on APPUiO/OpenShift, built with Lagoon, iterates fast at the edge – connected through a VPN/API gateway. This isn’t a Strangler Fig pattern. The interface between the two layers is exactly where governance lives. A digital asset platform is, by design, an agile edge – which is why Taurus’s 30+ bank customers all connect digital-asset capability at the edge of a stable core.

Pattern 2: Delegate platform ops, own your core. Everyone focuses on their own layer: banks focus on their business, Finnova focuses on banking software, VSHN focuses on platform operations. After Taurus moved to managed OpenShift, they were operating across 30+ institutions, 9 countries, and 3 continents, with several reclaimed FTEs redirected from platform maintenance to product and global expansion. Delegating platform ops also concentrates the compliance burden onto whoever can carry it best – which is why VSHN holds ISO 27001 and ISAE 3402 Type 2, and operates under FINMA guidelines.

Pattern 3: Evolutionary migration, not big bang. Taurus didn’t start with a fully managed enterprise platform – they grew into it in three deliberate stages: vanilla Kubernetes in 2018, then OKD (community OpenShift), and today, managed Red Hat OpenShift on VSHN. Each step was right for that stage of their growth. The lesson: you don’t need the full managed stack on day one, but you do need to design the handoff path from the start.

Operational practices that make financial-grade infra real

A few practices came up as non-negotiable in this space: biweekly zero-downtime upgrades as policy, not aspiration – because deferred upgrades quietly become security debt and compliance risk. Self-healing infrastructure isn’t just about reliability, it’s a compliance primitive. And certified operators beat DIY, even for something as well-understood as Elasticsearch – using ECK gives you a clean audit trail with no unsupported modifications.

The results speak for themselves: after the move, Taurus went from around 12 customer-impacting incidents per month to zero, with SLA achievement moving from 99% to 100%, driven by 24/7 managed ops, direct Red Hat escalation, and certified operators.

The honest part: what didn’t work

True to VSHN form, I didn’t stop at the success story. A few open questions I’d probe harder with hindsight: did the OKD-to-managed-OpenShift migration happen too late, and what did that interim period actually cost? How do you keep consistency at global scale when multi-geography compliance means different partners in different regions? How do you balance a stable biweekly platform cadence against an ecosystem that moves faster than most enterprise software cycles? And what should an RFP really screen for beyond technical specs – agility, escalation paths, and a willingness to co-design rather than just execute?

Highlights from the forum

A few things stood out over the two days in London beyond my own talk.

Platforms matter, whatever the industry. Whether you’re running infrastructure for finance, healthcare, or somewhere else entirely, the underlying challenges don’t really change. Security, availability, compliance, and the need to move fast without breaking production – these are the same conversations regardless of the label on the regulator’s letterhead.

Open source adoption in regulated industries is accelerating. A few years ago, “open source” and “regulated production” felt like they belonged in different rooms. Not anymore. Banks once feared open source; now their most critical infrastructure runs on it. The appetite for open, auditable, vendor-independent infrastructure in finance is growing quickly, and the questions from the audience reflected that shift – people aren’t asking if anymore, they’re asking how.

AI was everywhere, but it wasn’t everything. Unsurprisingly, AI featured heavily across the sessions. But the forum was a good reminder that solid tooling and honest conversations between people are still what actually gets regulated infrastructure into production. AI can help, but it doesn’t replace the groundwork.

Thank you, London

Thanks to the Linux Foundation and the Open Source in Finance Forum orgnisers for putting together two days of sharp, practical conversation. It’s encouraging to see how seriously the finance sector is now engaging with open source and cloud-native approaches for genuinely critical infrastructure.

Financial-grade open infrastructure isn’t about replacing what works – it’s about building the right fast layer alongside it, and handing the platform to people who live and breathe it. If you’re operating regulated platforms and thinking about how open infrastructure fits into that picture, let’s talk.

The Swiss Software Festival was back in Basel on June 24th 2026 – and the second edition delivered on everything the first promised, and much more. Around 650 people gathered at uptownBasel in Arlesheim to talk about software, platforms, and the forces fundamentally reshaping our industry: AI and Sovereignty. VSHN was back as a Matterhorn Sponsor, and didn’t just attend – we once again actively helped shape the program.

A festival that has found its rhythm

The second edition of any event is always a litmus test. The first year runs on excitement. The second shows whether there’s really something behind it. The Swiss Software Festival 2026 answered that question clearly: more attendees, more energy, and a program that genuinely feels well thought through. At uptownBasel in Arlesheim, there was life from the very first moment – with conversations in the hallways that carried on well into the evening.

Outside it was unusually hot for a June day in Basel. Anyone looking to cool down knew where to go: the joint VSHN and Red Hat booth was the most refreshing spot in the building. A good reason to stop by, strike up a conversation, and find out what we’re building right now.

Aarno on the main stage: digital sovereignty is not optional

VSHN founder Aarno Aukia took the plenary stage to make the case for digital sovereignty – not as a compliance obligation, but as a genuine architectural decision every engineering team faces today. In a world where AI pulls organizations toward convenience and speed, Aarno’s keynote was a sobering counterpoint: the question of where your platform runs, who controls it, and whether you can trust it is no longer just a legal question. It’s an engineering question.

Aarno also joined a panel discussion that went even deeper – into the tensions between open ecosystems and sovereign infrastructure. The questions were pointed, a sign that the topic is no longer abstract for most teams in the room.

Watch Aarno’s keynote:

Tech Track 2: Platform Engineering under pressure

VSHN’s Markus Speth chaired Tech Track 2 – Platform Engineering and Software Architecture – together with co-chairs Andreas from ti&m and Florian from Abacus Research. The track covered two full sessions on the two forces currently pulling platform engineering in opposite directions: AI and Sovereignty.

AI wants speed and flexibility. Digital sovereignty wants control and transparency. Your platform is caught in the middle.

The morning session focused on AI-native platforms: what does it mean when software rewrites itself, when agents gain access to infrastructure, and where is the competency gap quietly growing? Eficode, White Duck, Noser Engineering, and Adobe brought hands-on experience from systems where AI isn’t a feature – it’s part of the foundation. Both sessions closed with open discussion rounds that the audience engaged with intensely. A big thank you to all participants and the many great questions!

The afternoon put sovereignty and openness center stage as genuine architectural decisions. VSHN’s Tobias Brunner opened with a talk you won’t forget quickly: “Furniture, not lumber: what sausages, furniture and airplanes have to do with digital sovereignty.” The analogy landed perfectly – a memorable and surprisingly precise way to explain why not all sovereignty promises are worth the same, and what it really means to build on infrastructure you can trust. Speakers from PHOENIQS, Abacus Research, and ti&m rounded out the session with different perspectives on why open infrastructure decisions carry consequences that go far beyond vendor lock-in.

We were especially pleased to see Mohammad Alavi from HIN (Health Info Net) – a VSHN customer – speak in the festival’s dedicated Sovereignty Track. Watching a customer take the stage to share real-world sovereignty challenges in the Swiss healthcare sector was one of the highlights of the day, and a reminder that this conversation is anything but abstract for the organizations we work with.

And the Lego goes to…

No VSHN event appearance is complete without a Lego giveaway. This time we raffled a Lego Harry Potter set – and the winner is Daniel Haß. Congrats Daniel, enjoy the build! 🧱

See you next year

The Swiss Software Festival is establishing itself on the Swiss tech calendar. It doesn’t aim to be a huge conference – it aims to be a good one. With 650 attendees, a carefully curated program, a truly great venue, and compelling conversations, it succeeds.

Thanks to Swiss Made Software for a fantastic second edition, and to everyone who stopped by the booth, attended Tech Track 2, or caught Aarno and Tobias on stage.

See you in 2027!

The Swiss Software Festival is back for its second edition – and this year, we are giving away tickets. Read on to find out how to win, and what VSHN is bringing to Basel on June 24th 2026.

Back in Basel: Swiss Software Festival returns for its second edition

When the Swiss Software Festival launched last year, it immediately established itself as one of the most relevant gatherings for the Swiss software industry – a full-day event bringing together engineers, software architects, product leaders, and decision-makers under one roof. VSHN was there from the start as a Matterhorn sponsor, and the first edition delivered on its promise: great talks, real conversations, and a crowd genuinely invested in the future of software in Switzerland.

This year, the festival returns to Basel for its second edition, with up to 700 attendees expected and an even stronger program spanning plenary sessions, leadership panels, and dedicated tech tracks. We are proud to be a Matterhorn sponsor again – and this time, VSHN is not just attending but actively shaping what happens on stage.

Win tickets to Swiss Software Festival 2026

To share the excitement with our community, we are giving away 5 festival tickets. To enter the draw, simply subscribe to VSHN News, our monthly newsletter, below. That’s it.

Winners will be drawn on Wednesday, June 17th at 4 pm CEST. The competition closes at that moment, so make sure you are subscribed before then.

Subscribe to VSHN News to win

Update: the winners have been drawn and they are informed, congratulations!

What VSHN is doing at the festival

Beyond sponsoring, VSHN is deeply embedded in this year’s festival – from the Advisory Board, where Aarno serves as a member, to the plenary stage, the tech tracks, and the track chair role.

Aarno Aukia – keynote on digital neutrality

Aarno Aukia takes the plenary stage for the closing session, Digital Sovereignty: What’s next? His keynote is titled Digital Neutrality: Switzerland’s Engineering Advantage in the AI Era. Digital sovereignty has moved from a niche concern to a mainstream political and business priority – and Switzerland has a distinctive position in that debate. Aarno will lay out what that means in practice, followed by a leadership panel featuring voices from Microsoft, BSI Software, DeepCloud, Xelon, and the Swiss National Council.

Tobias Brunner – talk on platforms and ecosystems

Tobias Brunner speaks in Tech Track 2: Platform Engineering & Software Architecture. His talk, From platforms to ecosystems – why software innovation is a team sport, explores how platform thinking is maturing beyond infrastructure tooling. Building a platform is one thing – turning it into a thriving ecosystem where teams, partners, and products can grow together is another challenge entirely, and one that sits at the heart of what VSHN does every day.

Markus Speth – track chair Tech Track 2

Markus Speth is serving as Track Chair for Tech Track 2: Platform Engineering & Software Architecture. The track covers the full stack of modern platform engineering – from Kubernetes-based control planes and internal developer platforms to distributed AI workloads and multi-cloud runtime strategies. It is exactly the terrain VSHN operates in, which is why we were glad to help shape it.

About Swiss Software Festival 2026

The Swiss Software Festival is conceived and organized by Swiss Made Software and takes place in Basel. Now in its second year, the festival has quickly become a fixture in the Swiss tech calendar – a place where the people building Switzerland’s digital future come to exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, and find their next collaborators. With up to 700 attendees and a program built around both leadership perspectives and deep technical content, it is a rare event that works equally well for engineers and executives.

Don’t miss your chance to join us there – subscribe to VSHN News before June 17th at 4 pm for a chance to win your ticket.

We promise you no ads or any other nonsense – just exciting news about VSHN and the VSHNeers.

Another great edition of Cloud Native Zürich is behind us. Across the two interconnected venues, Abaton and Soho Zürich, more than 400 attendees – platform engineers, Kubernetes practitioners, developers, operators, and open source enthusiasts – came together for a day of learning, networking, and discussion across four tracks, including a dedicated Sovereignty Track for the first time.

VSHN was proud to participate once again as a Silver Sponsor, while Servala sponsored the Sovereignty Track.

VSHN booth with Legos 🙂

If you stopped by our booth, thank you for the great conversations – on Kubernetes and OpenShift, platform engineering, digital sovereignty, Servala, APPUiO, Codey, and the European cloud native ecosystem more broadly. And yes, the LEGO sets found new owners again this year. 🙂

On stage

Beyond the booth, we were also happy to actively contribute to the program this year:

Tobias Brunner gave a talk on how Servala came to be – from an internal observation at VSHN that our managed services lacked the marketplace experience customers were used to from the hyperscalers, to where Servala is heading as a growing ecosystem of cloud providers, software vendors, managed service providers, and implementation partners.

Aarno Aukia spoke about running LLMs the cloud-native way – building an open-source LLM stack on Kubernetes with tools like Kubeflow, vLLM, LiteLLM, and llm-d, and why that matters for sovereignty, compliance, and long-term operational control.

And in the new Sovereignty Track, Markus Speth was track lead and moderated a panel discussion with perspectives from across the ecosystem – an implementation partner, a cloud provider, a managed service provider, a software vendor, and civil society. We wrote a separate recap of that panel, which you can find here: Digital sovereignty – perspectives from the ecosystem.

A strong keynote

We were also looking forward to seeing keynote speaker Thomas Zurbuchen live again – always a highlight, and a reminder that the questions our industry is grappling with are part of much bigger conversations.

Data centres in space?

Thomas Zurbuchen also briefly raised the idea of operating data centres in space. He suggested that the economics could shift in the coming years – on the one hand due to rising energy costs on Earth, and on the other hand due to declining costs and efficiency gains in “getting payloads into space”.

The assessments of this idea diverged significantly afterwards. While it attracted a lot of attention, both the underlying economic assumptions and the claim that such systems would be “safer” in space than on Earth were discussed in further conversations during the aperitif and were viewed quite critically from different perspectives.

But actually, it would be quite a funny thought – just imagine someone saying “I quickly have to change a disk” and watching the engineer get launched into space… 🙂

Thanks to the organizers

A big thank you to the Cloud Native Zürich organizing team for putting together another excellent event – the level of detail, the community spirit, and the quality of the program keep getting better every year. If you couldn’t make it, or want to revisit a talk you missed, recordings will be published on the official Cloud Native Zürich channels – keep an eye on cloudnativezurich.ch for updates.

Want to be part of the ecosystem?

If digital sovereignty, sovereign managed services, or the broader Servala ecosystem are topics on your mind – check out Servala, and feel free to get in touch if you’d like to become part of our growing ecosystem of cloud providers, software vendors, and implementation partners.

See you next year!