Policy & Sovereignty

Go's BSD licence means Google can't restrict it even if they wanted to. The real sovereignty risk isn't who wrote the compiler, it's getting locked into GCP or AWS libraries built on top of it.

We ran Nginx Ingress for years. Then Kubernetes announced its retirement in November 2025. Because we'd adopted Gateway API, migrating to Envoy Gateway was straightforward. Here's the pattern that makes infrastructure components replaceable.

Putting all your workloads with one provider creates negotiating leverage—for them. European providers are competitively priced, not cheaper. The value is optionality: the ability to credibly discuss alternatives, which pays for itself in contract negotiations.

Data centers consume about 1.5% of global electricity and growing rapidly. When you choose where your workloads run, you're making environmental decisions. Here's how to evaluate sustainability claims, why Nordic regions and France matter, and the pragmatic European position on nuclear power.

We run production on Scaleway. Here's how we evaluated European providers, what criteria actually matter for production workloads, and why Scaleway's combination of managed Kubernetes plus essential services sets the standard for European cloud independence.

The Terraform license change taught us: widely adopted doesn't mean truly open. Kubernetes is different—CNCF-governed with over 88,000 contributors from 8,000+ companies. Your manifests work on Scaleway, OVHcloud, Hetzner, AWS, or bare metal. This is the portability foundation that makes independence possible.

When HashiCorp changed Terraform's license in August 2023, organisations that treated it as a standard got a wake-up call. Here's what we learned, why we moved to OpenTofu, and how Kubernetes demonstrates what a true standard looks like.

Europe's strength isn't in being a single superpower—it's in being multiple sovereign nations collaborating through shared frameworks. Open source follows the same model: multiple implementations collaborating through standards bodies. This isn't coincidence; it's complementary structure that makes European cloud independence natural.

The US CLOUD Act grants American authorities access to data held by US providers—regardless of where servers physically sit. Every euro spent on these platforms funds innovation abroad while starving Europe's own. We're financing our strategic subordination. For European tech leaders, this isn't a compliance checkbox. It's an architectural choice, and the path to regulatory independence starts with infrastructure independence.