Sovereignty: A VPN Outside the Blast Radius

While running outdoor, my mind has all the time of the world to reflect. During one of my recent runs, I was thinking of my sovereignty journey that progressed nicely. In the previous months I tackled a lot of hurdles such as power failure resiliency, robust storage, remote backup, minimal overhead, centralized monitoring and alerting, infrastructure as code, private networking, internet connectivity. Despite of these successes, a little voice kept nagging in my head. Continue reading

Sovereignty: Who is monitoring my cloud?

Chaos, Chaos and Chaos. That’s how I want to describe Last week. How stupid could I be, neglecting maintenance on my servers. What possibly could go wrong! I still get angry with myself over this rookie mistake. No matter what platform, there is always systems maintenance that needs to be done in the background. On the other hand, as being cloud native, this was something to be expected. On the hyperscalers, maintenance is done in the background, tucked away from the end user. Continue reading

Sovereignty: Is there a SysAdmin in the room?

For months my private cloud ran like a charm, suddenly my Gitea runners stopped working. In the runner output I noticed the message that my disk was full. Pocket‑ID, my identity provider, had some occasional hick‑ups. This slow decay of my cloud started the day I launched the individual services, no magic fairies that kept my cloud in a pristine condition. I omitted the obvious, I omitted some old skool system administration. Continue reading

Sovereignty: Getting control over your Source Control

Don’t get me wrong, both GitHub and Azure DevOps are fantastic development platforms. They have only one small problem that doesn’t fit my journey toward digital sovereignty: they fall under United States jurisdiction. This means that in the end, I don’t have full control over the intellectual property I store there. And at the end of the day I need to be sure that I have access to my source code, no matter what. Continue reading

Bye Bye OneDrive

One of the features that drew me initially to the cloud was the idea of having your information at your fingertips. As long as I had an internet connection, I had access to my documents and media. No matter where I was, no matter the occasion, no matter the time of day. Just open a browser, and I could pick up exactly where I left off. For me, that magic started around 2005 when I began working with SharePoint. Continue reading

Sovereignty: Identity Confirmed!

As you may know, I’m working my way out of American BigTech. A journey that is more complex than it seems at a first glance. There are so many choices that you need to make, such as hosting, technology stacks, containerization, storage, backup and restore strategies, continuous delivery etcetera. All of this need to be in place before you even can think of deploying your workloads. At this moment I almost reached the phase in which I can start deploying my workloads. Continue reading

Backups: The Illusion of Safety

Something was very, very wrong. Every day, for weeks, the same two emails landed in my inbox: Backup failed. Data corrupted. At first, I ignored them. Big mistake. A corrupted backup is, in many ways, worse than having no backup at all. You think you’re protected—until the moment you actually need it. That’s when false confidence turns into real risk. Time to get this sorted out, once and for all. Continue reading