DrupalCon Europe 2025 - Vienna: Recap

DrupalCon Vienna 2025 was an incredible, week-long gathering in the heart of the Austrian capital.

For amazee.io, the week was a vibrant mix of connecting with partners, meeting prospects, and sharing our latest products by amazee.ai.

We were extremely proud to represent and support the Drupal community, showcasing how open source innovation from scalable cloud hosting to private-by-design AI drives our culture forward.

🤝 Community and Connections: From Morning Jogs to Apéritifs

A personal highlight for me was organizing daily morning jogs. I was joined by between two and four community members each day for a 5-8km run starting at 6:45 a.m. on the Donauinsel. Doing this before the event floor opened was a perfect, low-key way to forge deeper, one-on-one connections with other attendees.

The week kicked off with the Partner Summit on Monday, where Matthew Saunders and Michael Schmid sat down with various other agency leaders representing a wide range of Drupal Certified Partners to discuss and shape the future of the Drupal ecosystem. Topics included current market trends, the project's future direction, the role of AI in the agency model, and upcoming opportunities and challenges.

While the sessions were packed with great technical insights, the real magic happened at our booth, where face-to-face meet-ups brought value and great conversations.

Our booth with our pet tag engraver attracted a steady crowd eager for personalized laser-printed tags for their little furry friends. 

We started by learning pet names, but the conversation quickly moved on to topics related to our products and the latest Drupal and hosting news.

We held an exclusive invite-only networking event on Thursday evening, a successful apéro designed to connect our team with business leaders. The focus was on building a deeper understanding of what they are doing with AI, what they might be lacking, and how our secure, hosted solutions could help close their innovation gaps.

🤖 Private AI and Enterprise AI Scalability

A clear theme of DrupalCon Vienna was the maturity of the AI initiative, and we were excited to showcase Drupal AI demos at our booth. The most common questions at the booth centered around our Private Drupal AI Provider: How does it work? How is it private?

We used this opportunity to showcase our Private AI Assistant and explain how our approach leverages secure hosting infrastructure to empower businesses to utilise AI without compromising data privacy. Our focus on "private-by-design" infrastructure resonates strongly with enterprise clients who prioritize data sovereignty and compliance, enabling them to innovate with AI safely.

On Wednesday, we participated in the AI initiative makers BoF (Birds of a Feather), discussing the community’s strategy to drive Drupal AI to the next level. The discussion solidified plans to actively fund key roles within the AI Initiative, ensuring collaborative development continues to push this core platform forward.

There was a lot of excitement around sessions such as Marcus Johansson's “Building AI Agents without Coding,” which highlighted the need for user-friendly tools to democratize AI.

🚀 The Future: Drupal CMS Roadmap

The keynotes and core initiative sessions offered an exciting glimpse into a streamlined, AI-capable, modern editorial experience for Drupal.

Dries Buytaert’s keynote highlighted significant progress on Drupal Canvas (formerly Experience Builder) and the new Marketplace for Modern Themes as part of the Drupal CMS Spotlights.

This clear direction toward an intuitive, out-of-the-box user experience perfectly complements our focus on high-performance, hands-off hosting that lets agencies focus on building rather than maintenance.

The CMS Spotlights Keynote provided an insightful look at the features coming to Drupal CMS 2.0. Key highlights include:

• Drupal Canvas: This new visual site-building tool will become the default page builder in Drupal CMS. It promises a no-code modern site-building experience with many blocks/plugins to aid in building out complex bespoke pages for your needs.
• Marketplace Site Templates: The new Drupal Marketplace will feature pre-built, production-ready Site Templates that build upon the existing Recipes functionality. This means users can launch a fully-styled, functional website in minutes. This is a massive win for both new users and rapid prototyping.
• AI Integration: The presentation emphasized AI’s role not just as a feature but as a deep architectural component. Innovations like Context Control Center will provide AI agents with brand guidelines, ensuring all AI-generated content is accurate and on-brand. Drupal's composability gives it a unique advantage in the AI era.

💪 Neurodiversity Superpowers

The focus on the human element continued with insightful sessions on well-being and diversity.

Vera Herzmann’s keynote captivated the audience with her presentation on Neurodiversity: an underrated superpower in business. She delivered a compelling message about the strength of neurodivergents and how they have superpowers that can help drive companies forward. Vera, who identifies as a highly sensitive person (HSP) and an extrovert, shared how this trait allows her to spot subtle patterns and bring high levels of empathy to her work, turning potential challenges into strategic advantages for her teams.

This theme was echoed in other critical sessions throughout the week, reinforcing the community’s focus on inclusion and health:

• John Albin Wilkins delivered a deeply personal talk on Shame, the bigger sibling to Imposter Syndrome, addressing mental health challenges often hidden in the tech world.
• Diego Costa spoke about Leading Through the Storm, sharing his journey with mental health to the C-Suite and normalizing that we can share our struggles and reach out to our colleagues.
• Panagiotis Moutsopoulos led a panel discussion with Esmeralda Tijhoff, Will Huggins, and Alejandro Moreno López entitled “We Need to Talk: Burnout, Belonging, and Being Human in Drupal.” The panel taught us that a healthy, sustainable community requires members to recognize, validate, and openly discuss the emotional toll of burnout and fatigue to collectively co-create practical support structures.

🎓 Drupal in a Day

I also attended the successful Drupal in a Day training with Hilmar, where over 60 people attended to learn about Drupal, demonstrating a strong grassroots interest in the platform.

Training the Next Generation: This is vital for Drupal’s long-term health. “Drupal in a Day” events create a low-barrier, hands-on entry point for students, developers, and potential new site builders. The community remains vibrant and adaptive as the contributor and user base grows. For amazee.io, this represents the next generation of engineers and site builders who will eventually use modern hosting solutions. Our commitment to open source extends to making tools like Lagoon and Kubernetes accessible, ensuring that new talent can learn and deploy on enterprise-grade infrastructure.

🏆 Splash Awards

DrupalCon Vienna hosted two outstanding Splash Awards events: the International Awards and the Germany/Austria Awards, both of which showcased the world-class work built on Drupal.

International Highlights

The International Splash Awards demonstrated Drupal's global impact, highlighting innovation and social relevance. The Non-profit win went to World Cancer Day - United by Unique (1xINTERNET GmbH), while the Tools/Apps category recognized cutting-edge AI with mossbo - The Innovative Cloud CMS Ecosystem with AI-Features (drunomics). World-class design and complex solutions were also celebrated, with Liip AG securing key wins for Museum für Gestaltung Zürich (Design/UX) and Canton of Basel-Stadt (Government). Additionally, Factorial GmbH won Education & Social/Community with DAISIE - Digital operation system for TelefonSeelsorge, confirming their role in delivering sophisticated digital projects alongside other enterprise wins like the BikeAlert B2B Platform (Commerce).

Germany/Austria Highlights

Our regional neighbors celebrated local excellence, with Factorial GmbH taking top honors in two major categories: Non-Profit for DAISIE, operating system for TelefonSeelsorge, and Enterprise for the large-scale Website Relaunch from Dole. Innovation was further recognized as drunomics GmbH also won the Solutions category for their mossbo, the innovative Cloud CMS Ecosystem with AI Features. This regional focus clearly highlights the high quality of Drupal projects and agencies in our backyard.

🔮 What’s Next?

The next DrupalCon Europe will be held in Rotterdam from 28th September to 1st October 2026!

The Netherlands is a country with a deep and active Drupal community, as proven by the energy at the yearly DrupalJam events. We’re thrilled to be helping the Dutch community prepare for the 2026 event and hope to see many new faces there. Our team is already planning exciting new surprises and cool activities for our booth. Keep your eyes peeled to find out more!

DrupalCon remains the best place to reconnect and celebrate our shared love for Drupal and the open web. The event was incredibly motivating and insightful, and personally, we are proud to be part of the future of the Drupal community and Drupal AI, in particular.

It is an exhilarating time for the next generation of Drupal, and at amazee.io, we are always happy to talk. If you have any questions about Drupal hosting, the Drupal AI Initiative, or our Private Drupal AI Provider, please get in touch!