KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 Co-located Event Deep Dive: Open Sovereign Cloud Day

Who will get the most out of attending this event? What is new and different this year? What will the day look like? Should I do any homework first? Find your community! Posted on March 16, 2026 by Co-chairs: Kurt Garloff, Peter Giese, Sachiko Muto, Margaret Dawson, Chris Aniszczyk, Gabriele Columbro, Mirko Boehm, Susan Remmert, Paula Grzegorzewska Open Sovereign Cloud Day arrives at a moment when digital sovereignty has moved from an abstract policy conversation to an urgent, practical engineering priority—especially across Europe. As cloud native continues to underpin modern infrastructure, the community needs clearer definitions, shared language, and actionable patterns for reducing dependency risk through open source and cloud native software. This co-located event is designed to make sovereignty concrete, explain what it means in practice, and show how teams can apply it with real-world examples and best practices. Open Sovereign Cloud Day is most valuable for platform teams and infrastructure operators who are directly responsible for managing risk, dependencies, and long-lived technology choices. These teams often sit closest to the decisions that shape sovereignty outcomes—where cloud strategy, operational resilience, security posture, and vendor reliance intersect. That said, the topic spans the full cloud native audience. Application developers, SREs, security practitioners, and architects will benefit from understanding how sovereignty concerns influence the stacks they build on and the systems they operate. The event is designed to help attendees translate a complex, sometimes vague concept into practical decisions they can apply within their own organizations. This event offers a distinct perspective compared to most cloud native gatherings. Rather than beginning with the stack and exploring what can be built with it, Open Sovereign Cloud Day begins with an outcome—digital sovereignty—and works backward to examine how cloud native software can strengthen it. The program is intentionally focused on clarity and action. It aims to define digital sovereignty in practical terms, explain its key dimensions, and then ground those ideas in real examples of sovereignty in practice.