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.

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. Something that you get for free if you use one of the big hyperscalers.

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?