Principal Technology Advocate
Jeroen is a Technology Advocate at SUSE, helping developers and platform engineers build open, portable, and resilient infrastructure. With a rich background spanning engineering, architecture, and product management, Jeroen now works at the intersection of cloud native technology and open source community, and believes strongly that the best infrastructure is the kind you actually understand and control.
As a trainer and speaker, Jeroen is known for his ability to distill complex technical concepts into actionable insights. He is passionate about solving challenging technical problems, whether through mentoring or hands-on involvement. An active contributor to the open-source community, Jeroen maintains several highly starred repositories.
When he's not diving into the latest technology trends, Jeroen enjoys spending time on his mini-farm, where he cares for his sheep and shares his love for rural life.
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.
