André Alfter

André Alfter is a Senior Director at Bechtle IT-Systemhaus Bonn/Köln, where he leads the company’s advisory business segment focused on future disruptive technologies. He is a longtime member and ambassador of the Platform Engineering community, known for his focus on critical infrastructure, sovereignty, and regulated industries across Germany and Europe. André is also the cofounder of Stellwerk Labs, an open source platform orchestration project (stellwerk.dev), which he built together with Clemens Jütte. The name Stellwerk refers to the German term for a railway signal box, a nod to the project’s role in steering and coordinating infrastructure. Drawing on years of experience advising customers in the public sector and defense space, André brings a distinctly German and European lens to conversations about digital sovereignty, arguing that true sovereignty is less about complete self-sufficiency (autarky) and more about the portability of workloads and applications across environments