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[Post Event] Cloud Fest 2025

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Together with the Endava Cloud team, I had the opportunity to participate in Cloud Fest 2025, held at Europa Park in Germany. Cloud Fest focuses on cloud technology from all fields, with a high focus on private and public cloud.

The session covered topics such as AI, open-source, security, sustainability, and the evolution of the cloud. Numerous showcases provided us with the opportunity to network and gain a better understanding of the EU market. 

 My primary goal for the event was to network and visit all the exhibitors. Yes, I visited all the exhibitors, and I had the opportunity to chat with around 120 of them. There was a mix of cloud hardware providers, solution providers for private cloud, physical and virtual appliance providers and startups from this space.

I was surprised that no public cloud vendors were present at the conference, considering there were over 150 exhibitors and more than 9,000 attendees.

The cloud repatriation trend in the EU is stronger than ever. This was evident not only at Cloud Fest, as seen in the sponsors and sessions, but also among the attendees. Most of them are part of organisations that aim to run a portion of their workloads in a private cloud. The hybrid cloud is a trend that we need to embrace, this is for sure.

 Nowadays, an organisation's cloud journey blends private and public clouds. We can no longer assume that the public clouds provided by AWS, GCP, and Azure can fulfil the needs of the European market.

This comes with challenges regarding the technical stack, technical approach, and the capabilities and skills required to build and run an IT ecosystem successfully. With an increasing number of parties involved in building the IT ecosystem, the challenges are on both sides: providers and end-customers.

My takeaway from Cloud Fest is related to the multi-cloud ecosystem. Where ‘multi’ means a blend between private and public cloud. Infrastructure and Platform Engineering skills are nowadays more important than ever. This will be a challenge because, over the last 10 years, there has been a shift towards public cloud knowledge, and finding people with deep infrastructure understanding can be a challenge at times.


If you are at the beginning of your IT journey, consider not only AI and public cloud but also technology and solutions related to on-premises solutions. The shift is imminent, and we need to prepare for it.

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