Principal Technology Advocate
Andrés Valero is a cloud-native veteran who thrives on turning 'complex' into 'clear.' Currently Working as a Technology Advocate for at SUSE, his career—stretching from Red Hat to Capgemini—has been defined by a mission to make modern infrastructure actually accessible. A seasoned speaker who has participated at events like the Open Infrastructure Summit and Red Hat Summit, Andrés specializes in helping teams look past the jargon to find the real-world value in Edge and Kubernetes. He’s driven by a simple goal: making modern infrastructure accessible and scalable for all.
2 speakers
Digital sovereignty is dominating boardroom conversations across Europe. However, it's being built, or broken, in pull requests. Every managed service you adopt, every proprietary SDK you reach for, every platform decision made for convenience over portability: these are sovereignty decisions, and they're being made by developers and platform engineers every single day.
This talk is not for your CISO. It's for you.
The Vikings didn't avoid the world, they were among its greatest traders and explorers. But they sailed their own ships, charted their own routes, and never handed control of their journey to a foreign power. Today's cloud landscape demands the same mindset. International companies cannot function without hyperscalers, and this talk won't pretend otherwise. AWS, Azure, and GCP are not the enemy. Dependency without contingency is.
In recent years, a wave of policies and compliance frameworks has reshaped the landscape, from the EU Data Act and NIS2 to the Cloud Sovereignty Framework. But cutting through that noise to find what actually matters for the people building applications and infrastructure is harder than it sounds. What does "off-ramp ready" look like in practice? We'll explore how industry standards, CNCF-aligned tooling, and open source solutions, covering everything from cluster management to open virtualization and zero-trust security, can give platform teams the portability, transparency, and control that proprietary stacks simply cannot offer. Not as a religion, but as a pragmatic engineering strategy.
But tools alone aren't enough. Sovereignty can't be bolted on at the end of a project or handed down from a compliance team. It has to live in your team's culture. You need to have a habit of naming trade-offs explicitly, building abstraction layers where lock-in risk is highest, and treating portability as a first-class architectural concern.
You'll leave with a clear mental model for thinking about sovereignty at the platform level, concrete architectural patterns for reducing lock-in without abandoning the cloud, and three actions you can take next Monday morning, no executive sign-off required.
Your longship should be yours to sail.