Sovereignty: The Illusion of Security without Automation

When people talk about building their own cloud, they usually focus on the cool stuff: spinning up containers, creating sleek dashboards, and showing off a fancy setup. I have to confess I’m no different. There is a strange satisfaction in watching a new service launch on your own hardware without asking permission from Microsoft, Google, or who else in the world.

But here is the dirty little secret nobody talks about: If you don’t automate maintenance and security, you don’t have a private cloud. You just have a ticking time bomb running in your meter cupboard.

Sovereignty: Getting control over your Source Control

Don’t get me wrong, both GitHub and Azure DevOps are fantastic development platforms. They have only one small problem that doesn’t fit my journey toward digital sovereignty: they fall under United States jurisdiction.

This means that in the end, I don’t have full control over the intellectual property I store there. And at the end of the day I need to be sure that I have access to my source code, no matter what.

Bye Bye OneDrive

One of the features that drew me initially to the cloud was the idea of having your information at your fingertips. As long as I had an internet connection, I had access to my documents and media. No matter where I was, no matter the occasion, no matter the time of day. Just open a browser, and I could pick up exactly where I left off.

For me, that magic started around 2005 when I began working with SharePoint. At the time, it felt revolutionary. Fast‑forward a few years and OneDrive entered the scene: a cloud‑based file system built on top of SharePoint’s foundations.

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.

Running a persistent SQL Server in Docker

In IT we always want to work with the latest and greatest, it’s in our DNA to explore new technologies. From time-to-time you get confronted with legacy technologies, robust but boring. One of such things is a piece of software I wrote more than 15 years ago for a friend. It was an application using a SQL Server database that controlled a couple of weighing terminals connected over RS232. Controlling machines is every geek’s dream. Every couple of years my friend asks me if I can help him to improve the software I wrote for him, this time it was no different.