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!

On May 21, 2026 the Cloud Native Computing Switzerland Meetup Community gathered once again at the VSHN Tower in Zürich for an afternoon of technical talks, discussions, and community exchange.

With more than 3’000 members in the meetup group, the CNC Switzerland community continues to bring together platform engineers, DevOps practitioners, architects, and open-source enthusiasts from across the Swiss cloud-native ecosystem.

The May edition featured four talks covering topics from Kubernetes-native deployment orchestration and Rust-based control planes to open-source project governance in the age of AI and cluster autoscaling for non-mainstream clouds.

Opening and community updates

The meetup kicked off with a short welcome and community update by the organizers. As always, the CNC Switzerland meetup follows a few important principles:

• All talks are technical and open-source focused
• No product or sales pitches
• Talks are held in English
• Speakers from diverse backgrounds are strongly encouraged

These principles help keep the meetup a true technical community event rather than a marketing stage.

Kuberik: Safe, hands-off deployments for Kubernetes

Luka Rumora

Luka Rumora opened the technical programme with a look at what continuous delivery on Kubernetes still gets wrong. Most teams, he argued, end up in one of two places: GitOps setups that stop at applying manifests, or brittle CI pipelines held together with bash and glue. Neither delivers true end-to-end delivery.

The ingredients of a good deployment pipeline are well known – canaries, health checks, smoke tests, promotions, rollback – but Kubernetes lacks a native, reusable way to compose them. Existing tools like Argo Rollouts, Flagger, and Kargo each solve a piece of the puzzle, but not the whole pipeline.

Kuberik aims to fill that gap. It orchestrates the full journey from release to production – detecting, gating, rolling out, verifying, and promoting – using opinionated, pluggable Kubernetes resources that integrate cleanly with existing GitOps setups.

The talk highlighted how a more composable, Kubernetes-native approach to CD can:

• replace step-based pipelines with reusable resources
• bring canaries, verification, and rollback under one model
• integrate with the GitOps tooling teams already run

Download slides

Kubernetes without the operator: A Minecraft panel with Rust and kube-rs

Hadi Cherkaoui – CM Informatik AG

Hadi Cherkaoui, a 17-year-old Plattformentwickler apprentice at CM Informatik AG, brought a refreshingly contrarian take on a pattern many in the room build their daily work around: the operator.

The project Anvil is a Kubernetes-native Minecraft server panel written in Rust. It creates one StatefulSet, PVC, and Service per server through direct kube-rs calls – with no CRD and no controller. The Kubernetes API itself serves as the runtime state store, and every user action is a direct API call.

The argument behind the design was just as interesting as the implementation: the operator pattern is sometimes the wrong tool. Controllers earn their complexity when there is autonomous state to reconcile. When there isn’t, they become ceremony. Anvil is a worked example of the imperative alternative, running on a home lab k0s cluster.

Key takeaways from the talk:

• not every Kubernetes-native application needs a controller
• direct API calls can be a perfectly valid pattern
• Rust and kube-rs make for an ergonomic combination
• homelab projects remain a great place to challenge defaults

Vibe code survival guide for open-source

Vadim Bauer – 8gears

Vadim Bauer, maintainer of the CNCF project Harbor, tackled a topic that is rapidly becoming one of the hardest in open source: how to keep a project coherent when AI-assisted contributions arrive faster than maintainers can review them.

Banning AI contributions outright, he argued, isn’t the answer – but neither is letting the volume erode a project’s direction. Drawing on experience from Harbor and Harbor Satellite, Vadim shared the playbook his team is building to stay sane:

• define a clear project direction so contributors, human or AI-assisted, know what is in scope
• set explicit acceptance criteria and guardrails
• use AI on the maintainer side to triage, review, and filter incoming contributions
• decide as a project what is core, what is an extension, and what is out of scope

The session was an honest look at what works, what fails, and how open-source projects can rethink contribution, community, and project boundaries in the age of vibe coding.

Writing a Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler provider with externalgrpc

Marco De Luca – VSHN

The final talk closed out the afternoon with a deep technical walkthrough from VSHN’s own Marco De Luca. At mdnix.io, he writes about infrastructure, Linux, Kubernetes, and the things he builds along the way.

The Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler decides when to scale, but it doesn’t know how to create a VM – that’s the cloud provider’s job. The upstream tree covers mostly the big clouds, which leaves regional and specialised providers out in the cold. With externalgrpc, you can plug virtually any cloud into the autoscaler over gRPC.

Marco walked the audience through:

• how the Cluster Autoscaler works under the hood and where the cloud provider fits in
• implementing an out-of-tree gRPC provider for a Swiss IaaS platform
• the design choices and parts of the contract that really matter
• the gotchas you only discover by reading the autoscaler source

By the end of the talk, attendees had a solid mental model of how to attach autoscaling to any cloud that isn’t on the upstream list – a topic particularly relevant for the Swiss ecosystem, where sovereign and regional cloud providers play an important role.

Download slides

Marco wrote a follow-up blog post about this topic if you want to dive deeper!

Networking and apéro

After the talks, participants stayed for networking and the traditional Swiss meetup apéro, continuing discussions about Kubernetes-native delivery, Rust, open-source governance, and autoscaling.

Meetups like these highlight the strength of the Swiss cloud-native community: engineers from different companies sharing real-world experiences, lessons learned, and open-source solutions.

Watch the talks

The sessions from this meetup will be published on the VSHN TV YouTube channel.

Subscribe to stay notified when the recordings become available.

Join the community

The Cloud Native Computing Switzerland Meetup welcomes engineers, architects, and developers interested in cloud-native technologies and open source.

If you would like to present a talk or share your project or sponsor the meetup location and apéro, submit your proposal here.

We look forward to seeing you at the next CNC meetup in September!

We are happy that VSHN is once again a Matterhorn sponsor of the Swiss Software Festival 2026. The festival takes place on June 24, 2026, at uptownBasel in Arlesheim, bringing together more than 600 peers, two plenary sessions, and over 75 speakers across seven thematic tracks and two special tracks.

This year’s edition has a clear focus, and it is one close to our heart: in times of geopolitical uncertainty, Swiss companies and organizations are increasingly looking for autonomy-first, Swiss-made solutions that support digital sovereignty. That is exactly the conversation we want to be part of – not just as a sponsor, but on stage and behind the program.

Aarno Aukia keynotes the opening plenary

VSHN co-founder Aarno Aukia is one of the keynote speakers in Plenary Session 1, “The future of software development.” His talk, “Digital Neutrality: Switzerland’s Engineering Advantage in the AI Era,” looks at a question that runs through the whole festival: who will build software in the future, humans or machines, and what that means for Switzerland’s position in an AI-shaped world.

He shares the stage with keynote speakers from UBS, IMD, and ti&m, followed by a leadership panel with voices from Adnovum, Adobe, and Abacus Research – a strong lineup for a discussion about where the Swiss software industry is heading.

VSHN chairs Tech Track 2: Platform Engineering & Software Architecture

We are also the track chair of Tech Track 2, “Platform Engineering & Software Architecture.” Modern software systems need more than tooling – they need thoughtful architecture and resilient platforms. This track digs into platform engineering, internal developer platforms, distributed systems, and cloud-native runtime strategies, from Kubernetes-based control planes to distributed AI workloads.

Our Product Manager & Partner Tobias Brunner contributes a talk titled “From platforms to ecosystems – why software innovation is a team sport,” alongside speakers from Eficode, White Duck, Abacus Research, and Noser Engineering.

See you in Arlesheim

The Swiss Software Festival has become a unique meeting point for the Swiss software ecosystem, and the topics on this year’s agenda – sovereignty, platform engineering, and the role of AI in software development – are right at the center of what we do at VSHN. We are looking forward to good conversations, great talks, and meeting the community in person.

Join us on June 24, 2026, at uptownBasel in Arlesheim. Tickets are available here.

We have been supporting the Cloud Native community for many years and are excited to once again sponsor Cloud Native Zürich in 2026.

Over the years, Cloud Native Zürich has become one of the most important cloud native community events in Switzerland – bringing together platform engineers, Kubernetes practitioners, developers, operators, architects, startups, enterprises, and open source enthusiasts from across the ecosystem.

At VSHN, supporting and helping grow the cloud native community has always been an important part of who we are. From sponsoring and attending community events, to organizing the Cloud Native Computing Switzerland Meetups, to contributing to open source projects and Kubernetes ecosystems – community has always mattered to us.

That is why we are very happy to be back as sponsors again this year.

Meet Us at Our Booth

If you are attending Cloud Native Zürich, make sure to stop by our booth.

We are looking forward to many great discussions around:

• Kubernetes & OpenShift
• Platform Engineering
• Digital Sovereignty
• Cloud Native Operations
• Servala – Sovereign App Store
• APPUiO
• Codey
• Open Source & European cloud ecosystems

Or simply stop by for a chat and good conversations. And of course, you can once again win a nice LEGO set at our booth. 😉

👉 Event website: Cloud Native Zürich

Servala sponsors the Sovereignty Track

This year, Servala is also sponsoring and helping shape the dedicated Sovereignty Track at Cloud Native Zürich 2026.

The track brings together talks and discussions around sovereign cloud infrastructure, open ecosystems, digital sovereignty, and practical cloud native approaches for independent infrastructure strategies.

👉 Read more about the Sovereignty Track at CNZ on Servala

Tobias Brunner: How to build a Sovereign App Store

At VSHN we’d been running managed services for Swiss companies for years before we noticed something obvious.

Our customers loved how we operated their PostgreSQL or their OpenShift, but they couldn’t reach it the way they reached AWS: through a marketplace, a self-service portal, a few clicks. So we set out to build one. That’s how Servala started.

In this talk I’ll walk you through how Servala came to be, what it is today, and where we want to take it next. On paper it’s a marketplace for sovereign managed applications like PostgreSQL, GitLab, Keycloak, and Nextcloud, deployed on European cloud providers and operated by managed service providers you can name and trust. In practice, it’s growing into an ecosystem of CSPs, ISVs, MSPs, and implementation partners who’ve decided that sovereignty is worth working on together.

I’ll also be honest about why this work feels urgent right now, and about what it will take for a sovereign app store to succeed: open standards, real choice, partners who show up, and customers willing to bet on something other than the default.

Panel Discussion: Digital Sovereignty – Perspectives from the Ecosystem

Markus Speth will be moderating the panel discussion “Digital Sovereignty – Perspectives from the Ecosystem”.

Digital sovereignty is widely discussed across technology, business, and society – yet what it means in practice is still evolving.

In this panel, participants share perspectives and experiences from different angles, exploring how digital infrastructure is shaped and how approaches in this space are developing.

Panelists representing the various stakeholders in the ecosystem:

• Implementation Partner: bespinian, Lena Fuhrimann
• Cloud Provider: Switch, Roman Bachmann
• Managed Service Provider: VSHN, Tobias Brunner
• Software Vendor: Red Hat, Simon Reber
• Society: Digitale Gesellschaft, David Sommer

Aarno Aukias talk: Running LLMs the Cloud-Native Way: Kubeflow, vLLM, LiteLLM and llm-d on Kubernetes

LLMs do not have to be consumed only through hyperscaler APIs. With Kubernetes and open source tools like Kubeflow, vLLM, LiteLLM, and llm-d, platform teams can build their own cloud-native LLM stack with more control over cost, data locality, model choice, and operations.

At VSHN, we believe AI platforms should be operated like other critical cloud-native workloads: automated, observable, reproducible, secure, and portable across infrastructure.

This session shows how an open-source LLM stack can be built on Kubernetes and why that matters for sovereignty, compliance, and long-term operational control.

Not Just a Sponsor, But Also on Stage

We are especially excited to not only participate as a sponsor with our booth this year, but also to actively contribute to the program – as speakers and moderators of the Sovereignty Track.

Through talks, discussions, and the panel around digital sovereignty, we want to help bring topics like open source, sovereign cloud infrastructure, and independent digital ecosystems further into the cloud native community.

We are also especially looking forward to seeing keynote speaker Thomas Zurbuchen live again.

Get Your Ticket with 20% Discount

Want to join Cloud Native Zürich 2026?

Use our discount code:

VSHN-20

and get 20% off your ticket purchase.

Cloud Native Zürich is one of the best opportunities in Switzerland to connect with the local and European cloud native ecosystem, discover new ideas, meet maintainers and practitioners, and exchange experiences around Kubernetes, platform engineering, AI, security, operations, and digital sovereignty.

Whether you are deeply technical, leading platform teams, building products, or simply interested in where the cloud native ecosystem is heading – this event is absolutely worth attending.

👉 Get your ticket now

On May 6 and 7, 2026, the Swiss DevOps and cloud native community gathered once again at Alte Kaserne Winterthur for DevOpsDays Zurich 2026. Once again, it reminded us why this event has become such an important part of the community over the years.

For us at VSHN, DevOpsDays Zurich is something special. We have been part of it since the very first edition in 2016 – as sponsors, participants, speakers, and community members. Watching the event grow over the years, while still keeping its open and community-driven spirit, has honestly been pretty amazing.

And somehow, despite the industry changing massively over the last decade, the core idea of DevOpsDays still feels just as relevant as it did back then: bring people together, share real experiences, talk openly about challenges, and learn from each other.

This year’s edition once again had exactly that feeling.

Real Talks Instead of Buzzwords

The program covered many of the topics currently shaping our industry – from platform engineering and AI to software supply chain security, observability, developer experience, and organizational culture. But what made the event valuable was not just the topics themselves, it was the way people talked about them: practical, honest, and grounded in real-world experience.

Some talks focused on scaling engineering organizations and platforms, others on AI-assisted operations and the growing importance of observability and verification. Security and software supply chain topics were also everywhere this year – from SBOMs and dependency management to secure coding practices in the age of AI-generated code.

One thing that stood out across many sessions was how much the industry is shifting from “just running infrastructure” towards building platforms, workflows, and ecosystems that actually help developers move faster without losing control or reliability. Platform engineering clearly continues to mature from a trend into a real discipline.

Really Fun Ignite Talks

One highlight this year were definitely the ignite talks. The new format with auto-advancing slides made the sessions feel even more dynamic, entertaining, and challenging for the speakers at the same time.

The format forced people to get straight to the point, which led to many talks feeling more personal, honest, and memorable. From AI and security to team culture and engineering realities, the ignites brought a great mix of technical insights, humor, and community spirit.

Aarno Aukia’s Sponsor Talk About VSHN

DevOps Is Still About People

At the same time, many talks also reminded us that DevOps has never only been about tooling. Sessions around leadership, collaboration, communication, and team dynamics showed once again that most technical challenges eventually become organizational challenges at scale.

That has honestly always been one of the strengths of DevOpsDays: it is one of the few technical conferences where people openly talk not only about successes, but also about failures, friction, and the messy reality behind engineering work.

And that openness continues outside the talks themselves.

Our Booth, Great Conversations, and the LEGO Winners 🎁

Of course, we also want to thank everyone who stopped by our booth. It was two days full of really interesting conversations – about Kubernetes, Servala, Codey, platform engineering, open source, AI, digital sovereignty, community topics, and everything in between.

That is honestly what makes events like DevOpsDays so valuable for us every year. Some of the best ideas and connections happen outside the talks themselves – somewhere between coffee breaks, sticker exchanges, and spontaneous discussions at the booth.

We were also very happy about the huge interest in our LEGO giveaways 👀

The winners of the two LEGO sets:

• LEGO The Simpsons Krusty Burger
• LEGO Red Hat Fedora

Congratulations again to the winners and have fun building. 😊

The Community Aspect Matters

The open spaces are still one of the best parts of DevOpsDays. Some of the most valuable conversations happen outside the official talks: spontaneous discussions in hallways, small groups debating architecture decisions, or people openly sharing what did not work in production.

That willingness to exchange experiences without pretending everything is perfect is what makes community events like this so valuable.

It was also simply great seeing so many familiar faces again and many new ones joining the community for the first time. The Swiss cloud native ecosystem has grown enormously over the last years, and DevOpsDays Zurich has definitely played a role in that journey.

Looking Ahead to 2027

A huge thank you to the organizers, volunteers, speakers, sponsors, and everyone involved. Community events like this require a massive amount of work behind the scenes, and it showed throughout the entire two days.

And now we are already looking forward to next year: the 10th anniversary of DevOpsDays Zurich. That is honestly quite wild to think about.

See you in 2027. 🎉