Digital Sovereignty in Action: Designing Cloud-Agnostic Platforms with Open Source

At a leading telecom operator, we have witnessed firsthand how rapidly platform requirements evolve as services scale from serving millions of users to supporting tens of millions of connected devices and mission-critical digital services. As our ecosystem expanded, we faced a common challenge: how do we continue to innovate at scale without becoming overly dependent on any single cloud provider, technology stack, or proprietary platform?

In this session, I will share our journey towards building cloud-agnostic platforms using an open-source-first approach. Drawing from real-world experiences operating large-scale telecom infrastructure, I will discuss the architectural principles, technology choices, and operational lessons that helped us improve portability, resilience, and long-term strategic control over our platforms.

The talk will cover how we leveraged Kubernetes, event-driven architectures, distributed data platforms, infrastructure automation, and observability frameworks to build scalable and resilient systems. I will also discuss some of the challenges we encountered along the way—from managing stateful workloads and platform standardization to balancing flexibility with operational simplicity.

Rather than presenting a theoretical framework, this session focuses on practical lessons learned, trade-offs made, and outcomes achieved while building and operating platforms at telecom scale using open-source technologies.

1. What digital sovereignty means from a platform engineering perspective

2. Practical patterns for designing cloud-agnostic architectures

3. How open-source technologies can help reduce vendor lock-in

4. Lessons learned from operating platforms supporting tens of millions of endpoints

5. Balancing flexibility, resilience, cost, and operational efficiency at scale