This week on Tri Diligence: the sovereign cloud - the idea that you don't need to rebuild Amazon to break free of it. About 90% of apps need only three primitives - object storage (S3), compute (Lambda), and a database (DynamoDB) - and mature open-source equivalents now exist for all of them (Garage/MinIO, Knative, ScyllaDB), plus containers for portability.
Our three hosts pull it apart:
Jake (the marketer) - the liberating fact: about €50 a month on a Hetzner box in Germany and you're sovereign from hour one, outside the US CLOUD Act. Europe has no hyperscaler of its own.
Sarah (the backer) - the asterisk on "free and scalable": hardware is cheap, your time is not. Which of three plays is a real business - personal/SMB independence, a sovereign PaaS, or a full IaaS provider?
Ryan (the technologist) - the real stack and its one hard problem (matching hyperscaler burst elasticity and scale-to-zero), plus where AI compute and sovereignty collide.
Proof it's real: 37signals (Basecamp and HEY, led by DHH) left the cloud - about $600k on hardware, saving roughly $2M a year - and even they chose colocation, not their own server room. The frame: the server room isn't the starting line, it's the finish line you grow into - and the first step costs less than dinner.
Each host ends with a verdict - invest, wait, or pass - and one concrete first step.
Tri Diligence is an AI-produced analysis, made for entertainment and idea-exploration, not investment advice.
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