Bram M.P. Verhagen

I am not a developer. I want to be upfront about that. During my bachelor's degree I took a few courses in C, C++ and Java. I understood enough to pass. Later in my career I did some self-study in Python and Terraform, enough to read code, follow what it does and occasionally hack something together. But writing software has never been my job, and I have never pretended otherwise. I am an infrastructure architect and cloud consultant. I think in systems, not in syntax.

My recent blog post about AWS European Sovereign Cloud generated more backlash than I anticipated. The core criticism was simple and sharp: AWS is still a US company. No matter how many legal structures you build, no matter how much you isolate the infrastructure, that fundamental fact doesn't change. The critics are right. And they're also missing the point. This isn't a defence of AWS. It's a reckoning with how we got here and what our actual options are.

When I wrote about AWS' Digital Sovereignty Pledge earlier, I approached it primarily from a data perspective. I focused on where your data lives, who can access it and how you can control it. That made sense to me at the time. Data sovereignty felt like the whole story. Recent global developments have taught me otherwise. The world has become a more unpredictable place. We've seen how quickly geopolitical tensions can escalate and how supply chains can become leverage points.