Cloud Native Summit Munich 2025: Engineering, Community, and Giving Back
Our Cloud Native Summit Munich 2025 retrospective: platform engineering, European tech regulation, software security, and the community behind the event.
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Cloud Native Summit Munich 2025 was another opportunity to step away from day-to-day delivery, exchange ideas with fellow engineers, and reconnect with the people building the cloud-native ecosystem.
As a returning Gold Sponsor, ape factory was pleased to support the conference and join the community in Munich. This year’s program brought together almost 50 presentations and six workshops, covering the engineering and organizational questions shaping modern platforms.
What stood out to us was the connection between technology and responsibility: building platforms around their users, understanding how European regulation affects engineering teams, and treating software security as an ongoing practice rather than a final checklist.
Three Talks That Stayed with Us
With so much on the agenda, selecting highlights is never easy. These three presentations captured issues that are particularly relevant to our work with production platforms and the teams operating them.
Platform Engineering: Build, Measure, Learn
Build-Measure-Learn for Platform Engineering: Applying Lean Startup Principles to Platforms — Klaus Langeheldt
A platform is only valuable when it solves real problems for its users. This session explored how the Lean Startup’s build-measure-learn feedback loop can help platform teams validate assumptions, learn from developers, and prioritize capabilities that deliver measurable value.
Why it matters: Internal developer platforms should evolve as products, guided by user feedback rather than feature lists alone.
Build-Measure-Learn for Platform Engineering: Applying Lean Startup Principles to Platforms
Klaus Langeheldt
European Regulation Meets Cloud-Native Engineering
What EU Tech Regulations Mean for Cloud-Native Teams — Paulina Dubas, ape factory
We were especially pleased to see Paulina Dubas contribute on behalf of the ape factory team. Her presentation addressed the evolving European regulatory landscape and what it means in practice for teams working with AI tooling, large language models, and financial technology.
Why it matters: Compliance is not just a legal conversation. Requirements around security, accountability, and data handling influence architecture, development processes, and operational decisions.
What EU Tech Regulations Mean for Cloud-Native Teams
Paulina Dubas — ape factory
Security Before the Deadline
Stop Playing Catch-Up: Secure Your Future Before the CRA Hits! — Mario Fahlandt, Kubermatic
The EU Cyber Resilience Act raises the stakes for organizations developing and maintaining software. Mario Fahlandt’s presentation explored how preparing early, with help from existing open-source tooling, can turn a compliance obligation into an opportunity to strengthen engineering practices.
Why it matters: Product security and software supply-chain controls are most effective when built into everyday delivery workflows—not bolted on just before a deadline.
Stop Playing Catch-Up: Secure Your Future Before the CRA Hits!
Mario Fahlandt — Kubermatic
Conversations Beyond the Sessions
The conference program is only part of the experience. Equally valuable are the conversations at the sponsor stands, between presentations, and over coffee—where engineers compare notes on what actually works in production.
Our stand drew plenty of visitors, helped along by an annual ape factory tradition: custom conference T-shirts. The giveaway and prize draw gave us another reason to meet people, hear what they were working on, and talk about the challenges behind their platforms.
Helping Conference Knowledge Reach Beyond the Venue
Community conferences depend on a great deal of work that attendees do not always see. Recording talks is one example: it extends the value of the event to people who cannot attend, but it also adds production costs.
In 2025, when sufficient funding for conference recordings had not been secured, ape factory offered a financial safety net to help make the recordings possible if the remaining funding gap could not be closed.
This was not a conventional, separately branded recording sponsorship. It was a practical commitment to help protect an important part of the event: making technical knowledge available beyond the conference room.
For us, supporting open-source communities also means helping create the conditions in which people can share what they have learned.
Looking Back—and Forward
Cloud Native Summit Munich 2025 reinforced a simple lesson: strong platforms are not defined by tooling alone.
They need to work for their users. They need to respond to changing security and regulatory requirements. And they benefit from an open community willing to share practical experience—including what did not work.
Thank you to the organizers, speakers, volunteers, sponsors, and everyone who joined us in Munich. We were glad to be part of it.
Relive Cloud Native Summit Munich 2025
Two days of talks and conversations are difficult to capture in a single article. Fortunately, there’s more to explore.
Explore the Photo Gallery
Want to revisit the people, atmosphere, and moments that made the event special? Browse the Cloud Native Summit Munich 2025 photo gallery .
Watch the Conference Recordings
Missed a session or want to revisit a topic in more depth? Explore the Cloud Native Summit Munich 2025 recordings on YouTube and keep the technical conversations going.
