Sovereignty: When the lights go out!

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

Sovereignty: Core infrastructure

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

Sovereignty: the first steps

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