Noud Savenije
I'm a software engineer in the Netherlands. I work on European cloud sovereignty: what it takes, concretely, to move off the US cloud — and whether it's as hard as everyone assumes.
For a decade the decision criteria were reliability, price, and ease of use, so we all ended up in the same three US clouds. Where our data physically lives, and whose law reaches it, never made the list. Now it does — and most organisations have no idea what leaving would cost them, because nobody has actually tried it end to end.
So I'm trying it end to end, in public: domain, hosting, git, identity, CI/CD, analytics. Every piece replaced with something European or self-hosted, and every piece written down — including the parts that are genuinely worse.
A CLI that provisions a fully self-hosted European developer platform in a single command: Forgejo for git, Authentik for identity, Argo CD for delivery, Traefik and cert-manager for ingress and TLS — on k3s, on one server. Landing zones, SSO, and GitOps wired together, opinionated on purpose.
The long-form version: what actually breaks, what it costs, and where the European alternatives are still thin.
Digital Sovereignty in a US-Dominated World: How to Register a .nl Domain
This site runs on the platform it describes. It's served from a single Hetzner box in Germany, on k3s, behind Traefik with certificates from cert-manager. The source lives in Forgejo, Forgejo Actions builds the image, and Argo CD deploys it on every push. Logins go through Authentik. All of it was provisioned by Bootstrapper.
No US cloud. No CDN. No external fonts — this page makes zero third-party requests, which is also why it loads instantly. Analytics are Umami, self-hosted, cookieless, no personal data: there's nothing to consent to, so there's no consent banner.