Alek's Blog - digital-sovereignty

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>

Who Has Access? Humans, Accounts, AI Agents

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

Part 1</a> split the technology-supply-chain question into two halves: what the platform is built on, and who — or what — actually has access to it. Part 2</a> answered the first half. This post answers the second, using systems already built and operated for this blog rather than new research — human access, service-account access, and (increasingly relevant) AI-agent access, all checked against the same bar: is it documented, is it audited, and is it technically enforced or just expected to be followed.</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>



Can You Leave? Data Portability & Egress
aleks — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Part 1</a> deliberately kept Question 4 — can you
leave — at the general level. This post is the deep-dive: concrete data-export
formats, API and query-language openness, and egress pricing already documented for AWS, GCP,
Azure, and OVH, plus new findings on how the five sovereignty offerings from
Part 2</a> actually hold up on exit.</p>


Digital Sovereignty: The Complete Guide
aleks — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
This is the index and reading guide for a six-part series built around one idea: “sovereign cloud”
is a marketing label until it’s tested against something specific. Part 1 sets out five concrete
questions to test it against instead of taking the label at face value; Parts 2 through 6 are the
deep-dives that answer each one in turn — grounded, wherever possible, in research or systems
already published elsewhere on this blog rather than written fresh for the series.</p>


What Does It Cost to Leave — or Arrive?
aleks — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Part 1</a> deliberately kept Question 5 at the
general level too: on-prem is largely sovereign, but “engineering time re-architecting for a
new platform’s primitives, process changes… and a skills gap no one accounted for” apply whichever
direction you’re moving. This post is that deep-dive — the last of the five, using examples already
built and published rather than new claims about any provider.</p>


Who Builds the Platform? Ownership vs. Stack
aleks — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Part 1</a> raised the technology-supply-chain
question with one case: Open Telekom Cloud, legally owned by Deutsche Telekom, running on a
Huawei-licensed platform. Five more prominent, more recent cases turn out to follow the same
pattern — checked here against primary sources, not just repeated from secondary coverage —
alongside three providers where ownership and technology stack come closer to aligning, each with
its own gaps left intact rather than smoothed over.</p>