Tom Meurs — Sovereign Systems

“We want to migrate to Kubernetes by November.” It was September. The client was an e-commerce company. Their biggest sales event of the year — Black Friday — was in late November. I said no. They asked if I knew someone who might take it on anyway. I did. A fellow platform engineer — someone I respect, highly capable. I made the introduction, but warned him about the timeline. He took the engagement, documented the same concerns I had, got them signed off. The client proceeded anyway. ...

“Autonomous cluster management” — the promise that an AI can monitor your Kubernetes cluster, diagnose problems, and perhaps even fix them without human intervention. It sounds like the holy grail for platform engineers. The reality is more nuanced. In this post I test K8sGPT with a locally running Llama 3.3 70B model on Apple Silicon. No cloud APIs, no data leaving your network, fully sovereign. Is this usable for real cluster diagnosis? Let’s find out. ...

Three trends are converging right now that should terrify anyone paying attention. Each one alone would be concerning. Together, they fundamentally change the privacy calculus. Let me explain why privacy matters more in 2026 than at any point in human history. Trend 1: Mass Data Collection Is Complete This isn’t news. We’ve known for over a decade that every email, every text message, every phone call, every location ping, every purchase, every search query is being collected somewhere. The Snowden revelations were 2013. We’ve had thirteen years to process this. ...

In my previous post about self-hosting for everyone, I painted a vision of managed self-hosting where anyone can own their data. But there’s an uncomfortable truth I glossed over: hardware costs money, and the economics are fundamentally different for businesses versus individuals. Let’s talk about the elephant in the server room. The Financial Reality When a business buys a €1,000 server, here’s what actually happens: Factor Business Individual VAT Deductible (€0 net) €210 lost Corporate tax benefit ~25% deduction (€197) None Write-off 5 years depreciation Just an expense Cash flow Business expense After-tax income Net cost ~€593 €1,000 A business effectively pays 40% less for the same hardware. But it gets worse. ...

What if you could have complete control over your email, your photos, your documents, your everything — without needing to understand Linux, Kubernetes, or networking? What if self-hosting was as easy as paying a monthly subscription, but instead of feeding your data to Big Tech, you actually owned it? This is the future I’m building towards. The Problem: We’ve Lost Control Every day, billions of people hand over their most intimate data to companies whose business model depends on exploiting it. Your emails, your photos, your location history, your browsing habits — all stored on servers you don’t control, governed by terms of service you didn’t read, in jurisdictions that may not protect your rights. ...