AI Austria Meetup "Inside the AI"-Edition

We'd like to invite you to our sixth installation for the Cloud Native Vienna MeetUps in 2026! Again we'll have two deep-dive talks and time to network and chat with friends in the Viennese Cloud Native community. A big thank you to Wien IT for hosting us and providing food and drinks! Agenda: 17:30: Doors Open & Networking 17:55: Welcome from the Organizers 18:00: Talk 1: TBD 18:45: Break & Refreshments 19:00: Talk 2: Sohan Maheshwar - Build global-scale Authorization in your web app with SpiceDB and Kubernetes 19:45: Open Networking We look forward to seeing you there! —- Sohan Maheshwar - Build global-scale Authorization in your web app with SpiceDB and Kubernetes Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) publishes a "Top 10 Security Risks for Web Apps" list. Guess what topped their list this past year? Broken authorization. This talk will start with the importance of Authorization, and establishes the problems with the status quo. Also covered are the core concepts behind Relationship-Based Access Control aka ReBAC, and SpiceDB - a mature and widely adopted open source ReBAC system inspired by the system internally powering Google services: Zanzibar. The talk will conclude with a demo of how to model real-world systems with SpiceDB and then deploy it on to Kubernetes for global-scale authorization in your application.

THIS MEETUP WILL BE IN PERSON What to expect: 🗣️ Two or Three speakers 👥 Meet old and new friends from the community 🍕 Free food 🎉 Open-end and free drinks afterwards ✔️ Just RSVP! Agenda: 17:30 - Doors open 18:00 - Welcome 18:05 - 🗣️ Lukas Zainzinger \- Escaping the Trap: A Pragmatic Approach on Decision Making to avoid Vendor Lock\-In 18:50 - Break 19:00 - 🗣️ Roland Rittchen \- OpenStack: From Sovereignty to Liberty 19:45 - 🎉 Open-end 🧑‍💻 Speakers: Lukas Zaininger \- Site Reliability Engineer at Willhaben Escaping the Trap: A Pragmatic Approach on Decision Making to avoid Vendor Lock-In Adopting third-party platforms and cloud-native services accelerates delivery, but it often comes with a hidden cost: vendor lock-in. When switching costs balloon and migration paths vanish, architectural agility suffers. How do you balance development velocity with long-term technological independence? In this talk, I will break down a pragmatic, 2-step evaluation process used at willhaben to assess third-party solutions before writing a line of integration code. You’ll learn how to implement a practical Service Decision Matrix that quantifies service quality, operational complexity, and operation costs within a realistic vendor lock-in framework. Roland Rittchen \- Senior Platform Engineer at SQUER OpenStack: From Sovereignty to Liberty Europe has spent three years building sovereign cloud. Regulators demand it, the European Commission procures it, and a dozen providers now sell it. But sovereignty answers a question about jurisdiction — and it quietly leaves the harder one unanswered: if you can't actually move, you aren't free. You've just changed who owns you. This talk takes the promise literally and tests it. One OpenTofu repository, one Flux repository, three targets: a self-hosted OpenStack cluster running on three mini PCs, plus two European public clouds. We measure how much genuinely transfers, find the places it leaks, and confront the gap nobody p

☕ AI Breakfast: Real Talk, No Slides We’re hosting the AI Breakfast Vienna — a casual, high-signal meetup for the AI community. Whether you’re a researcher, an AI engineer," a founder, or a policy innovator, this is your space to connect. We’re breaking down the silos between research, product, and engineering to spark real discussions before the workday even begins. When: Oct 23th, 9:00 AM Where: Cafe Museum - Literatursalon - Table reserved under "Cristian Hofmann / AI Austria" Hosts: Cristian, Amin, and Ruben Cost: Order breakfast at your own expense Space is limited! 👉 RSVP only if you’re 100% sure you can make it.

🙌 Join us for another evening with the UX Vienna community! Prompting for Designers: From Vague Requests to Reliable Outputs In this UX Stammtisch, we’ll look at practical prompting patterns for common designer tasks: research synthesis, copy generation, journey mapping, and more. After a long break, we’re finally back to hosting the Stammtisch in person at das Packhaus in Vienna’s 3rd district. Expect a relaxed evening of short inputs, live prompt walk‑throughs, and plenty of time to swap tips, tools, and war stories with fellow designers and researchers. Feel free to bring your own snacks and drinks as non can be bought at the venue. By participating, you agree that your likeness may be recorded and authorise UX Vienna to use any such recordings for event documentation and promotional purposes.