CNG Zürich

  • Date: 29 October 2026
  • Time: 2 – 9 PM CET, with reception from 6:30 PM
  • Where: Meta Offices, Zürich

A CNG community gathering in Zürich, Switzerland.

Join us in Zürich for an afternoon of talks, demos, and community with cloud-native geospatial practitioners at the Meta Offices, from 2 to 6 PM, followed by a reception at a nearby venue from 6:30 PM.

CNG Zürich is part of the 2026 CNG global event series. To support the series, please see the CNG 2026 Community Partner Program.

Agenda

Opening
13:30Doors open, check-in & coffee
14:00Welcome & IntroductionJed SundwallRadiant Earth
14:10Welcome from our hostsMeta Zürich
Session 1: Open infrastructure, built in the open15-minute talks, joint Q&A at the end
14:15From Tiles to Trust: Operating a National Near-Real-Time Sentinel-2 / Aerial Imagery Pipeline on COGs and STACLessons from two years of running swisstopo's serverless pipelines that publish analysis-ready imagery to a national STAC catalogue within hours of acquisition.David Oeschswisstopo
14:30Mapterhorn Terrain and ImageryAggregating open terrain and aerial imagery from government platforms, and distributing it as PMTiles on Source Cooperative and Cloudflare R2.Oliver WipfliMapterhorn
14:45Serverless Spatial Data Infrastructures with PortolanWhat if a spatial data infrastructure could just be files in a bucket? An open spec, toolkit and registry for publishing catalogs on object storage.Nissim LebovitsRadiant Earth
15:00The Distributed Renewable Energy (DRE) Atlas: Accelerating Energy Access through Geospatial DataThe architecture behind settlement-level energy access analytics for 58 countries, published in cloud-native formats on Source Cooperative.Giorgio BasileVIDA.place
15:15Q&A with Session 1 speakers
15:25Coffee break
Session 2: Cloud-native at scale15-minute talks, joint Q&A at the end
15:40From ArcGIS to Cloud Native: Rebuilding Geocoding for Catastrophe ModellingHow Swiss Re moved from a six-month desktop GIS update cycle to automated cloud-native pipelines for global reference data.Jan WinklerSwiss Re
15:55Terrazarr: Multiscale GeoZarr at Planetary ScaleAn open-source library for lazy, resumable GeoZarr pyramids, used to build a global 10 m settlement raster in about three hours.Federico OldaniMindEarth
16:10Lancelot: Millisecond-Speed Similarity Search on Commodity Hardware at Global ScaleSearching ~7 billion Earth observation embeddings in tens of milliseconds on a single node and plain object storage.Hutch IngoldEarth Genome
16:25Earth Engine in a Cloud-Native, Agent-Driven WorldHow the Earth Engine team is thinking about open standards, cloud-native formats, interoperability and AI agents.Michael DeWittGoogle
16:40Q&A with Session 2 speakers
16:50Break
Lightning talks & sprint readout5 minutes each
17:00Exploring a Zarr 3D Cube with SQL in the BrowserLive demo.Gjore MilevskiDevelopment Seed
17:05Equal Earth Maps Using Cloud-Optimized FormatsPirmin KalbererSourcepole
17:10From Parquet Files to an Evolving Cloud-Native Climate-Adaptation AnalysisStephan HeuelResilens
17:15Geo Embeddings Sprint readoutResults from the two-day sprint at IBM Zürich, 27–28 October.Michelle RobyRadiant Earth
Panel discussion
17:25Making the Shift: Cloud-Native Inside Swiss InstitutionsWhat actually changed when teams moved to open formats on object storage, and what's still missing. Moderated by Jed Sundwall.David OeschswisstopoJan WinklerSwiss ReStephan HeuelResilensMichael DeWittGoogle
Closing
17:50ClosingJed SundwallRadiant Earth
18:30ReceptionAt a nearby venue, to be announced. Until ~21:00.