Swiss Cloud Native Day 2025 – A New Peak of Innovation & Community on Mount Gurten

September 18, 2025 – Bern, Switzerland

The clouds cleared, the funicular was full, and the Swiss cloud-native community came together once again – this time high up on beautiful Mount Gurten in Bern. Swiss Cloud Native Day 2025 was one of those special days where you could truly feel the energy: curiosity, knowledge sharing, and the momentum of a community building something big together. From newcomers to long-time experts, from platform engineers to toolmakers – innovation and collaboration were everywhere.

What made this year special

• Location & setting. Mount Gurten offered an inspiring backdrop: beautiful, accessible, and high enough for big ideas. A perfect place for the cloud-native community to summit together.
• Community focus. Organized by “bernerit.rocks”, the event showed once again that Swiss practitioners are not just consumers of cloud technology, but active shapers of how cloud-native culture, practice, and governance evolve locally – with a global outlook.
• Great speakers. The program was packed with talks from PostFinance, SAP, Canonical, Exoscale, CERN and many more. Highlights included:
  • Julia Baum and Mohit Dalal on SAP’s internal developer platform
  • Benjamin Schimke from Canonical
  • Paul Farver from the LEGO Group, blending humor and deep insights with his role as “YAML Engineer & Minifigure Poser”
  • Our VSHNeer Liene Luksika with a powerful story about Crossplane
• 5 Year Swiss Cloud Native Day Special VIP Badge for attendees who attended all 5 years:

VSHNeer Spotlight – Liene Luksika on Crossplane

One of the day’s highlights was the talk by our colleague Liene Luksika: “How we used Crossplane for the things we should not have”.

Frameworks are meant to be tweaked – that is part of an engineer’s daily life. Even if a new cloud-native open source framework promises exactly what you are trying to build yourself.

Liene told the story of what Crossplane is and what we hoped it would be. She highlighted why the emerging Crossplane V2 is necessary and how it differs. Most striking was the real-life experience: when bending turned into breaking – and during a maintenance window we lost 230 production databases for a customer. The silver lining – we kept the customer, but fundamentally changed our approach. An honest, educational and inspiring session that gave the audience plenty of food for thought.

The LEGO touch

LEGO once again brought its magic to the event. A true highlight was Paul Farver’s talk “The Bricks That Make Us – How the LEGO Group Avoids 50 Mediocre Kubernetes Implementations”. With humor and seriousness alike, he showed how large organizations can avoid technical sprawl, ensure consistency, share best practices – and prevent reinventing too many wheels (or bricks).

The VSHN LEGO competition once again lit up the room. This year’s winner Clément was celebrated with applause and lots of photos – a perfect symbol of the event: building together, brick by brick. Congratulations Clément!

Servala – Sovereign App Store

Another central theme at this year’s Swiss Cloud Native Day was Servala, the new Sovereign App Store by VSHN.

Why Servala stood out:

• For software vendors, Servala offers an easy way to provide their products as managed services, distribute them through the marketplace, and reach enterprises without having to build their own operational infrastructure.
• For enterprises and private clouds, Servala means standardized, managed services that meet compliance, security, and audit requirements – while still offering flexibility. A major step toward digital sovereignty.
• For cloud providers, Servala is a true differentiator: infrastructure alone is no longer enough. The real value lies in services. A sovereign catalog of vetted managed applications is becoming increasingly important.

Conversations around Servala were lively: How do SLAs work, how is trust between providers and users established, what does data locality and regulation mean in Switzerland and Europe? The audience was clearly ready to dive deep into these questions.

What people talked about after the event

• How to avoid reinventing the same Kubernetes architecture in different parts of an organization
• What “sovereignty” really means in cloud-native contexts: data location, governance, open source, auditability, avoiding vendor lock-in
• The role curated marketplaces like Servala play in helping teams move faster – but also safer
• Interoperability and standardization – across cloud providers and within deployment pipelines

Conclusion

Swiss Cloud Native Day 2025 may have only lasted one day, but it truly packed a punch. Once again it showed that in the cloud-native ecosystem, technology alone is not enough – culture, community, trust, and sovereignty are just as important.

From Mount Gurten, the view was not just over Bern – it was also over a future where Swiss and European cloud-native solutions do not simply follow the big players, but carve their own path – shaped by openness, control, compliance, and innovation.