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 p