Cloud Native Zürich 2026 Recap

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!