Alek's Blog - cloud-act

Sovereign-Cloud-Washing: Five Questions

aleks — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Sovereign cloud” is printed on marketing pages from AWS, Microsoft, Google, and a long list of European providers alike. The label rarely comes with a definition, which makes it easy to satisfy on paper and hard to verify in practice. I’ve put together five concrete questions, asked of the claim itself instead of the label — enough to see, from several angles, what a provider actually stands behind.</p>

Legally vs. Technically Enforced

aleks — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The same distinction has come up three times already in this series without being named directly: BYOK in Part 1</a>, two vendors’ own statements in Part 2</a>, and Kubernetes RBAC against a written CLAUDE.md</code> rule in Part 3</a>. This post makes it explicit, adds a third rung most sovereignty marketing doesn’t reach yet, and applies it across everything the series has found so far — no new research, just naming a pattern that kept repeating.</p>