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.

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.

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. For science and out of curiosity, I unplugged the main power line feeding the UPS. The UPS took over instantly, and the Lenovo server, network equipment, and the Synology NAS kept running smoothly.

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? How do you manage it all? And most importantly: What are the principles you refuse to compromise on?

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. But that’s not what digital sovereignty is really about.

Revamping my blog in a changing world

The world we live in is changing at a rapid pace. Not only technologically, but also geopolitically. As a kid, I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s — a time when tensions between the West and the East were high, with both sides threatening to obliterate each other using nuclear missiles. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, East and West found more common ground, and the fear of mutual destruction began to fade.

The Art of Conversation

In the 1990’s when I did my bachelor in computer science, teachers told us that we would be replaced by 4GL languages. Languages in which end-users would describe how applications should work. At that time we laughed at them, saying we saw the exact opposite. Oh dear, we were right. Code became complexer, new concepts arrived on the horizon and software development matured. Fast forward to the 2020’s…

Over the last year, I’ve been giving a lot of GitHub Copilot training sessions world wide. Sessions in which I learned the attendees what GitHub Copilot could mean for them and how they could get the most out of it. In that time I noticed that I was particular a fan of GitHub Copilot chat. A Chat interface in which I could talk to my bestie, asking him all kinds of questions. My bestie would answer my questions as good as possible.