TAPPaaS: A Sovereign PaaS Blueprint for Europe’s Public and Civic Sector
AW1.120 | Day 1 | 17:00 - 17:25 | Speakers: Lars, Erik
Abstract
Many public bodies, NGOs and small providers in Europe want to move away from US‑dominated cloud platforms, but struggle to build and run their own stack with small teams and limited capacity. At the same time, the threat landscape makes it urgent to build more resilient infrastructure for critical public services.
TAPPaaS is a trusted, automated and privacy‑friendly Platform as a Service, built only with Free and Open‑Source Software, that makes it easier for small teams to run sovereign workspaces and public digital services. In this talk, we present the TAPPaaS blueprint and show how we combine existing FOSS building blocks into a sovereign, standards‑based stack that can be operated by SMBs, NGOs and local governments with limited resources. We highlight how automation and common patterns reduce operational effort, improve security and resilience, and avoid lock‑in to proprietary hyperscalers.
TAPPaaS is work in progress, so we share what already works well in pilots and prototypes, where we still hit hard problems, and which trade‑offs we made along the way. Attendees will leave with a concrete blueprint for running a sovereign PaaS with a small team. TAPPaaS comes with pre selected modules and integrations that can reuse in their own public or civic infrastructure, and clear ways to get involved as consumer, operators or contributors in shaping TAPPaaS as a building block of Europe’s public digital infrastructure.
Speakers
Lars Rossen is one of the founders of the tappaas.org initiative. When not working on open source he provides independents executive advisory in the area of Digital Transformation and Standardization.
Before becoming an independent advisor in the spring of 2025 he was the Chief Architect and SVP for engineering of shared services and components at OpenText where he drove the overall OpenText technical strategy and oversaw the shared components and engineering services through which OpenText achieves alignment across its vast commercial services and products. This includes designing, building, and running the digital factory based on IT4IT for all OpenText engineering. Lars also oversaw OpenText’s hyperscaler and platform strategy and associated platform architecture, as well as UX strategy, performance engineering, DocOps and internationalization programs Lars created the first version of the IT4IT™ Reference Architecture which formed the basis for the standard in The Open Group, and Lars continues to be the lead architect for the IT4IT initiative. This forms a foundation for delivering an open and composable digital factory based on value stream thinking. Lars have published numerous white papers on IT management, and holds 5 patents on technology management. Before OpenText Lars Rossen was the Group CTO for Micro Focus. In this role he was driving the overall Micro Focus technology and integration strategy. as well as driving the implementation of the Digital Factory for Micro Focus. Before joining Micro Focus, Lars was a Fellow at Hewlett Packard Enterprise where he worked for the CTO organization. He defined the software portfolio architecture and strategy. Lars was also part of the core team that defined HPE's CloudSystem strategy and associated solution portfolio. This included creating the innovative Hybrid Cloud Management product suite. Prior to joining the portfolio strategy office, Lars headed up HPE’s Operational Support System practice for Europe, Middle East and Africa. Lars holds an MS in engineering, an executive MBA with focus on technology management, and a PhD in computer science from the technical University of Denmark. Lars currently calls Copenhagen his home, but has lived in HongKong, Scotland and California.
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