SOVRAK

You did not choose a hyperscaler. You chose the fastest route to a working deployment, and a hyperscaler happened to be it. Years on, the bill has a life of its own, the managed services you leaned on have quietly become the reason you cannot leave, and a prospect’s procurement team is asking about data residency in terms you cannot answer without a lawyer.

The alternative has always been worse. Self-hosting means becoming a platform engineer: reverse proxies, certificate renewal, single sign-on between services that each authenticate differently, a CI runner, backups you actually test. That is a job you cannot fill, so you stay.

SOVRAK is the assembly work, already done.

The output is plain Docker Compose you can read, diff, and edit. There is no proprietary runtime and nothing phones home. If you stop using the tool tomorrow, the stack it generated keeps running.

Why SOVRAK exists

I did not set out to build infrastructure. I was building something else — a product whose market is specifically European — and the further I got, the more of my time went to a question that had nothing to do with the product: where the data was allowed to live, how do I honor GDPR requests, and who could be compelled to hand it over.

The hard part was never understanding the rules — it was that nothing on offer fitted a company my size. Everything assumed either a platform team I did not have or a compliance budget I was not going to spend, and the gap between those two answers is where most startups quietly end up.

So I worked out the pieces myself — identity, source control, CI, backups, the rights machinery — and assembled them until the thing ran. Then I started hearing the same story from other founders: the same gap, the same dead end, the same weeks lost to plumbing that was never the point. Bundling up what I had already built and generating it for someone else was the obvious next step. That part took a couple of months.

Finding a name that was both available and fitting took, embarrassingly, rather longer.

SOVRAK is a backronym, and not a subtle one: a Self-Owned, Vendor-Replaceable Application Kit. Self-owned, because the machine is rented in your name and everything on it runs in your account — I hold no keys. Vendor-replaceable, because every piece on the menu above is open source and swappable, including the piece that is me.

What this is not

It does not remove operational responsibility — it removes the weeks of assembly before anything runs. You still own the server and the decision to restore from backup at three in the morning.

If you have a working platform function and a Kubernetes investment you are happy with, do not migrate. If you need managed services with contractual availability guarantees, this is the wrong shape of thing. Saying so costs me a few enquiries and saves us both a bad quarter.