Souvereignty: 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.

A keynote at KubeCon Europe 2026 gave me a better perspective.

Sovereignty is about taking control of your workloads and your data.

It’s about deciding where and how you run and use them, instead of being locked into a single vendor’s ecosystem or a single government’s rules.

Using open standards and open source technologies is a way to achieve this. It lets you build systems that are portable and transparent, not controlled by one company or government. It’s about creating a future where technology works for you, not the other way around.

Last year, Microsoft decided to increase the price of M365 Office Family by almost 40%, jumping from €99 to €139 per year. I had no choice but to accept the price hike. That’s when the idea started to grow: moving away from the Microsoft Cloud. The services my family and I use most are Outlook and OneDrive, but I didn’t know how to replace them. What software should I use? Should I host externally or do it myself?

I already have a Synology NAS, a fast internet connection, a solid internal network, a UPS and a compact home server. So why not do it myself? Run the applications as containers on the home server. Expose web traffic through the Synology’s reverse proxy, where SSL offloading happens, and store the data on the Synology itself.

The solution started to take shape. But then, a flood of new ideas popped up: Single Sign-On, Multi-Factor Authentication, backing up the Synology data to an external location, writing documentation to consolidate the new knowledge, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD… The list kept growing.

Suddenly, things started to get out of control (as usual 🙈). This wasn’t just about replacing Outlook and OneDrive. It became a full-blown project to build a self-hosted, sovereign digital environment.

At Xebia, one of our core values is “Quality without Compromise.”

We live and breathe cloud and DevOps. So when I built my own cloud, I want to bring those same principles home. No shortcuts, No excuses, No half-baked solutions.

That’s why I will follow this set of rules for my setup:

No bloatware: No junk slowing things down or adding unnecessary risks.
Low overhead: Keep it lean. No wasted resources on stuff I don’t need.
Secure: Lock it down tight, apply encryption, use access control. Minimize the blast radius.
Infrastructure as Code: Everything as code. If I can’t version it, it’s not happening.
Automate everything: No time for boring, repetitive tasks.
Well documented: Future me needs to understand this stuff. No docs? It doesn’t exist.
Config files first: Minimize clicking around in GUIs, if possible use JSON or YAML.

Ambitious? I don’t think so. Adventurous? You bet, tons of new technologies to explore!
I know I won’t build it over night. I will start small and improve it along the way. The next step is setting up the base infrastructure, to get things running.

Stay tuned…