What happens when a cloud conference focuses on architecture decisions instead of selling products? Ideally, you go home with a better technical solution. That is exactly what we experienced at the first Sovereign Cloud Days in Saarbrücken.
The first Sovereign Cloud Days took place in Saarbrücken from October 22 to 25, 2026. The event combined two focus areas: the Südwest Digital Track for strategic questions and the OpenInfra & Cloud Native Track for the technical community.
We attended on October 24 and 25 at the htw saar campus. The focus was on open infrastructure, cloud-native technologies and experience from real-world operations.
What we particularly appreciated: no sales presentations, no superficial product promises. Instead, the discussions addressed technical decisions, concrete challenges and which architectures prove themselves in practice.
Open interfaces instead of provider lock-in
ayedo also contributed a talk.
Our managing director presented how different infrastructure providers can be integrated into a shared operational architecture through open IaaS APIs and Kubernetes.
The basic idea: a provider's infrastructure and the application layer running on it do not have to be tightly coupled.
Standardized interfaces make it possible to connect different infrastructure offerings without having to redevelop the operational and application layers above them for every provider.
This is particularly relevant for federated cloud architectures. They are intended to enable the shared use of resources from different providers without becoming fully dependent on a single infrastructure operator.
However, the practical viability of these approaches is not determined by the availability of open APIs alone. The specific architectural decisions behind them are what matters.
And that is exactly what was discussed in Saarbrücken.
A question that changed our architectural assumption
The discussion following the talk was particularly valuable to us.
Matthias Tinnemeier asked a specific question: does every customer really need a separate OpenStack domain, or are isolated projects sufficient?
Until then, we had planned to use separate domains for our use case.
The discussion showed, however, that isolated OpenStack projects can already meet our requirements. An additional domain per customer is not necessary.
This is no minor detail.
OpenStack domains provide organizational separation of identities and projects. Projects, in turn, enable resource isolation and the assignment of permissions within a cloud environment.
The appropriate structure therefore depends on the actual requirements for identity management, tenant isolation and operations.
For our specific use case, separation at the project level is sufficient.
This insight simplifies our architectural approach. And it came from a critical question from the community rather than an internal meeting.
Why events like this matter to us
For us, open source means more than using software with publicly available source code.
It also means making technical concepts understandable, sharing experience and opening our own assumptions up for discussion.
Particularly with complex cloud infrastructures, there is rarely a single architecture that makes equal sense for every requirement. Different operating models, security requirements and organizational conditions lead to different solutions.
That makes it all the more important to talk to people who have already solved comparable problems or deliberately follow a different approach.
The Sovereign Cloud Days provided the right setting for this.
The value of a technical conference is not measured by how often it confirms an existing opinion. It is measured by whether you can make better decisions afterwards.
A successful debut in Saarland
We are particularly pleased to see a format like this take place in Saarbrücken.
The topics reach far beyond Saarland: open cloud infrastructure, interoperability, Kubernetes, OpenStack and the question of how to reduce technological dependencies.
The first Sovereign Cloud Days demonstrated that these questions can be discussed at a high technical level without turning the event into a succession of vendor presentations.
We came away from the two days with new contacts, interesting technical perspectives and a concrete insight for our own architecture work.
Our conclusion: a successful debut with real technical value.
Thank you to the organizing team, the speakers and everyone who contributed to the discussions. We hope the Sovereign Cloud Days become an established event.
We would be happy to return for the next edition.