Coding Architect

Tinkering with cloud and opensource technologies...

Sovereignty: Identity Confirmed!

2026-05-25 6 min read Souvereignty Bas Van De Sande
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

2026-05-11 6 min read Souvereignty Bas Van De Sande
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

Souvereignty: When the lights go out!

2026-04-15 6 min read Souvereignty Bas Van De Sande
No matter how meticulously you set up your infrastructure, a power grid failure will take your servers down, unless you have a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) to keep things running. A UPS takes over the power supply, until its battery runs out. But here’s the catch: even the best UPS is pointless if your services don’t restart automatically when power returns. I recently put this to the test while installing a car charger at home. Continue reading

Souvereignty: Core infrastructure

2026-04-10 9 min read Souvereignty Bas Van De Sande
We’ve forgotten how to build things ourselves. The public cloud is like a dealer: you pay for what you need, when you need it. It’s very convenient, but you’re trapped. Trapped in their ecosystem, their rules, their pricing, their price bumps. Escaping that trap requires some serious planning. It’s about answering the hard questions: What hardware do you use? What do you repurpose, what do you buy? Which stack do you trust? Continue reading

Souvereignty: the first steps

2026-04-02 3 min read Souvereignty Bas Van De Sande
The 1984 Apple commercial is legendary! A young girl throws a hammer into a screen, breaking the control of corporate power. When I started writing this blog about sovereignty, that image popped into my head. Sovereignty, or digital sovereignty, is a term we hear a lot these days. What does it actually mean? And why is everyone talking about it? At first, I thought it was just about making sure personal data doesn’t fall under the US Cloud Act, which allows the US government to access it. Continue reading