For years, cloud has been discussed primarily in terms of cost, scalability, and developer experience. Today, geopolitical risk is forcing a different conversation. Those dimensions matter. But geopolitical instability is forcing a different conversation — one about resilience, continuity, and control.

Geopolitical instability is now a cloud risk

Recent events in the Gulf have made this tangible. When regional tensions affect energy systems, logistics routes, and physical infrastructure, the consequences extend beyond ports and shipping lanes. They reach data centers, cloud platforms, and application availability. Both private and public actors may find their ability to operate significantly impaired.

Digital infrastructure is never purely virtual

The point bears repeating: digital infrastructure is physical. Cloud resilience starts with a simple fact: digital services depend on physical infrastructure, legal jurisdictions, supply chains, and people on the ground. Data centers, connectivity, power supply, and maintenance all depend on local conditions, local access, and local stability. When those conditions deteriorate, digital dependence becomes operational exposure.

Strategic digital autonomy deserves to be treated as a matter of preparedness, not ideology.

This does not mean isolation or withdrawal from international partnerships. It means ensuring that critical capabilities remain under trusted legal, technical, and operational control, particularly when the external environment becomes volatile.

For governments, regulated industries, and strategic enterprises, the question has evolved. It is no longer only about where workloads are hosted. It is about whether essential services can remain available when a region becomes unstable, when connectivity is degraded, when legal exposure shifts, or when infrastructure concentration creates systemic risk.

Resilience depends on control, not only scale

Scale brings clear advantages. But scale, resilience and control are not the same thing. Global platforms can also create dependencies that are easy to underestimate in stable times: single-provider concentration, single-region exposure, external jurisdiction, and logistical fragility. A major disruption does not need to take down an entire system. It only needs to affect enough of the stack to slow or paralyze operations.

In other words, cloud risk is no longer just a cybersecurity or procurement issue. It is also a matter of continuity, jurisdiction, and concentration. This is why sovereign and trusted cloud models should now be considered core elements of resilience planning.

In practice, that means protecting critical workloads on infrastructure that can be governed with confidence. It means reducing single-provider dependency, designing architectures that withstand degraded conditions, aligning legal jurisdiction with strategic interests, and investing in local skills, local operators, and local capacity.

In peacetime, these choices can appear redundant. In a crisis, they become the difference between disruption and continuity.

What is unfolding in the Gulf today confirms a broader trend: digital infrastructure now belongs to the same strategic tier as energy, logistics, and communications routes. The same geopolitical shock that disrupts supply chains and industrial activity can disrupt cloud availability in parallel.

What policymakers and executives should now assess

This should lead policymakers and executives to ask more direct questions. Who controls the infrastructure we depend on? Under which jurisdiction does it operate? How quickly can critical workloads be moved or isolated? Can essential services continue under degraded conditions? Do we genuinely control our continuity plan, or have we outsourced too much of it?

Cloud strategy is no longer an IT discussion. It is a matter of economic security and strategic independence.

For critical services, resilience must now be designed into the cloud strategy itself. The question is no longer whether to adopt the cloud. It is who remains operational when stability can no longer be taken for granted.

This is especially true at a time when digital sovereignty has moved to the very center of the European debate. The question is no longer whether Europe needs digital sovereignty, but how it can be achieved in a concrete, pragmatic, and credible way. The challenge now is to move from principles to actual capabilities: controlled infrastructures, competitive European technology providers, native regulatory compliance, and sustainable economic models.

Diagnosis: European Cloud Sovereignty in a Fragmented Digital Landscape

The internet, once envisioned as a unified global commons, is increasingly polarized. We observe a clear divergence between an open, data-driven model, often characterized by its focus on attention capture, and increasingly closed, state-controlled models, as seen in countries like Russia and China. This fragmentation is underscored by reports of declining internet freedom globally, indicating a steady erosion of online rights and a more fractured digital sphere.

Geopolitics now profoundly influences technology policy. Export controls, data-localization rules, and platform restrictions have become common instruments of statecraft. For instance, the United States has tightened export controls on advanced computing and AI-related semiconductors, demonstrating the intricate link between technology and foreign policy.

Within this evolving landscape, cloud computing stands as a critical backbone for digital transformation. However, Europe faces a significant dependency challenge in this sector. European cloud providers currently hold only around 15% of their own regional cloud market, with the majority of growth captured by non-European hyperscalers. This imbalance highlights a broader threat to Europe’s digital sovereignty.

Layered on top of these trends is the accelerating AI industrial revolution. Projections indicate AI could add trillions to the global economy by 2030, with private investment in generative AI soaring. The rapid adoption of AI across organizations signals a paradigm shift, disrupting well-established parts of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector and fundamentally reshaping business and society.

Pathways for Remediation: Rebuilding European Cloud Sovereignty

Europe's response to these challenges is rooted in its core values, offering a pragmatic and hopeful path forward:

Privacy as a Competitive Edge: The GDPR Effect

To secure digital sovereignty, Europe must reinforce its domestic tech ecosystem. This requires a pragmatic and proportionate approach, facilitating easier access to public procurement for European innovators, increasing scale-up finance, and implementing targeted industrial policies for strategic technologies such as cloud, AI, and semiconductors.

The goal is not protectionism, but closing capability gaps so European firms can compete on value, reliability, security, and regulatory alignment—ensuring Europe remains a source of digital innovation rather than merely a consumer of others’ advancements.

Strengthening the Home Base: A Pragmatic, Proportionate Approach

To secure digital sovereignty, Europe must reinforce its domestic tech ecosystem. This requires a pragmatic and proportionate approach focused on opening doors for European SMEs and scale-ups, limiting structural barriers to market access, facilitating participation in public procurement, increasing scale-up finance, and implementing targeted industrial policies for strategic technologies such as cloud, AI, and semiconductors. The goal is not isolation, but to close capability gaps, enabling European firms to compete on value, reliability, security, and regulatory alignment. This will ensure Europe remains a source of digital innovation, rather than solely a consumer of others' advancements.

Being the World’s Bridge: Connecting Ecosystems

Europe is uniquely positioned to connect diverse digital ecosystems rather than contribute to their fragmentation. Leveraging its network of economic relationships, Europe can align digital standards, security, and interoperability across continents. This approach aligns with the European Union’s Digital Partnerships with like-minded countries such as Japan, South Korea, Canada, and Singapore, which aim to foster trusted digital cooperation and shared standards globally.

Rebuilding European cloud sovereignty also requires relying on European cloud and PaaS providers that operate under EU jurisdiction and align infrastructure, governance, and compliance by design.

Building Cultural and Technological Bridges for Cloud Sovereignty

At Clever Cloud, a European cloud and PaaS provider, these principles translate into concrete choices: operating infrastructure under European jurisdiction, supporting open technologies, and designing cloud services aligned with GDPR and European regulatory frameworks.

This also highlights the need for a clear, credible, and widely recognized label defining what qualifies as a sovereign cloud solution in Europe. Today, multiple initiatives and certifications coexist, but none fully provides a shared, legitimate reference at the European level. Establishing such a framework is essential to bring clarity to users, guide public procurement, and strengthen trust in genuinely sovereignty-aligned cloud solutions.

In my role as VP International Growth at Clever Cloud, my responsibility is to make Europe’s digital leadership tangible on the ground. I work to translate this human-centric vision—championed by our CEO, Quentin Adam—into concrete practices that support local ecosystems and long-term digital autonomy.

There is another path to technological acculturation—one that prioritizes mutual understanding, long-term trust, and local empowerment over one-size-fits-all expansion models.

Local partnerships, acculturation, and shared value

When I enter a new market, I don’t arrive with a prefab playbook. I start by partnering with local providers, integrators, and universities; I listen, adapt to regulations and languages, and align with how business is actually done. This approach creates a two-way exchange of knowledge and trust, which is the only way cloud adoption becomes sustainable. My goal is to empower communities to advance their own strategic autonomy and data sovereignty—while staying connected to a global network.

Local Money—because sovereignty needs roots

I invest locally whenever I can: local data centers, local talent, and fair value-sharing. As I like to say, “Ain’t sovereignty if it ain’t your money.” Practically, that means helping customers and partners keep control of their data, costs, and roadmaps—without sacrificing global interoperability. If our presence doesn’t strengthen the local digital economy and create durable growth, we’re not doing it right.

Distributed R&D and talent development

I’m building a truly multi-national innovation network by establishing R&D capabilities where we operate. I focus on training the next generation of engineers locally and connecting them across borders. This doesn’t just create high-skilled jobs or reduce brain drain; it injects diverse ideas straight into our product roadmap, making our platform more robust and relevant worldwide. The synergy that emerges when talent from different cultures works on the same hard problems is one of the most powerful forces for progress I know.

This bridge-building mindset is pragmatic and hopeful. Today, I’m collaborating across Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, working with partners in Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, and engaging with Canada, and Brazil. I’m not interested in picking sides; I’m interested in raising the floor for reliability, resilience, and sovereignty-friendly cloud everywhere we operate.

A Diplomatic, Builder’s Mindset for European Cloud Sovereignty

Europe’s path is neither laissez-faire nor lock-down. A human-centric approach must combine trustworthy rules, real industrial capability, and international cooperation.

That means making trust a feature—from GDPR today to accountable AI governance tomorrow. It means backing European builders—SMEs and scale-ups—through smarter procurement and financing. And it means bridging continents by aligning interoperable standards so innovation flows both ways.

If policymakers, businesses, and civil society embrace this approach together, Europe will not only navigate a polarized, AI-accelerated world—it will help shape it. That is the standard I set for my work: technology that improves lives, strengthens connections, and turns fragmentation into collaboration.

In this article, we present the adaptations made to enable the deployment of Brinjel on Clever Cloud, thus providing scalable, secure, and sovereign infrastructure for farmers and agricultural institutions.

Why Choose Clever Cloud for Brinjel?

Running an Elixir container on Clever Cloud offers several advantages:

• Scalability: The infrastructure automatically adjusts to the workload, ensuring smooth operation even during peak usage.
• Security and Sovereign Data Management: Clever Cloud provides hosting compliant with data sovereignty requirements.
• Ease of Deployment: With just a few commands, an application can be deployed to production, with seamless integration of complementary services like databases, storage, and emails.

Adaptations Made for Deployment

To make Brinjel fully operational on Clever Cloud, several improvements have been implemented:

Integration of MailPace

Email sending is now handled via MailPace, an integrated solution at Clever Cloud. The adaptation was made through the Swoosh module by adding dynamic adapter support.

PostgreSQL URL Support

Adding support for POSTGRESQL_ADDON_URI enables better database management by directly utilizing the URL provided by Clever Cloud.

S3 Support for File Management

Implementing an S3 backend via Clever Cloud’s Cellar add-on ensures optimized storage of images and files.

Hardware and Method: Deployment on Clever Cloud

Below are the detailed steps to deploy Brinjel on Clever Cloud, allowing for a quick and efficient installation of the application in a sovereign cloud environment.

Initial Configuration

Start by retrieving the official version of Brinjel from its main repository, apply the specific deployment modifications from your fork, then merge the changes before proceeding with the deployment.
Type the following commands:

git clone https://framagit.org/brinjel/brinjel.git && cd brinjel 
git remote add deploy https://framagit.org/wanoo/brinjel.git 
git fetch deploy 
git checkout -b deploy-clevercloud deploy/deploy-clevercloud 
git merge origin/main

Creating the Application on Clever Cloud

Create a new Elixir application and add the necessary services.
Type the following commands:

clever login 
clever create --type elixir --region par --org brinjel-prod 
clever addon create postgresql-addon brinjel-db --plan xxs_med --org --link brinjel-prod --addon-version 17 
clever addon create cellar-addon brinjel-cellar --plan s --org --link brinjel-prod 
clever addon create mailpace brinjel-mail --org --link brinjel-prod

Setting Up Environment Variables

Add the necessary environment variables to ensure the application runs properly.
Type the following commands:

clever env set PHX_HOST "brinjel.mydomain.ltd"
clever env set BRINJEL_FIRST_USER_EMAIL "admin@mydomain.ltd"
clever env set BRINJEL_FIRST_USER_FARM_NAME "MaJolieFerme"
clever env set BRINJEL_FIRST_USER_PASSWORD "ChangeMe_Brinjel12345"
clever env set BRINJEL_FROM_EMAIL "noreply@mydomain.ltd"
clever env set CELLAR_ADDON_BUCKET "brinjel-prod-mydomain"

clever env set ADMIN_USER_IDS "1"
clever env set BRINJEL_ENVIRONMENT "prod"
clever env set BRINJEL_FIRST_USER_CREATE "true"
clever env set BRINJEL_PHOTO_STORE "s3"
clever env set BRINJEL_SWOOSH_ADAPTER "mailpace"
clever env set CC_CACHE_DEPENDENCIES "true"
clever env set CC_MIX_BUILD_GOAL "compile"
clever env set CC_PHOENIX_ASSETS_DIR "assets"
clever env set CC_PHOENIX_DIGEST_GOAL "assets.deploy"
clever env set CC_PHOENIX_RUN_ECTO_MIGRATE "true"
clever env set CC_PHOENIX_SERVER_GOAL "phx.server"
clever env set CC_POST_BUILD_HOOK "mix sass.install"
clever env set CC_RUN_COMMAND "mix release && _build/prod/rel/brinjel/bin/brinjel eval \"Brinjel.Release.createdb\" && _build/prod/rel/brinjel/bin/brinjel eval \"Brinjel.Release.migrate\" && _build/prod/rel/brinjel/bin/brinjel start"
clever env set DISABLE_REGISTRATION "true"
clever env set LANG "fr"
clever env set MIX_ENV "prod"
clever env set PADDLE_API_KEY "test"
clever env set PADDLE_CLIENT_TOKEN "paddle_token"
clever env set PADDLE_ENVIRONMENT "sandbox"
clever env set PADDLE_NOTIFICATION_KEY "good_key"
clever env set PHX_SERVER "true"
clever env set PORT "8080"
clever env set SECRET_KEY_BASE "$(openssl rand -base64 64 | tr -d '\n')"

Deploying the Application

Before proceeding with deployment, two configuration steps are required:

Configuring the Cellar Bucket on Clever Cloud

• Access the Clever Cloud console.
• Select the Cellar add-on.
• Create the bucket defined by the CELLAR_ADDON_BUCKET variable as "brinjel-prod-mydomain".
• Save the changes and verify that access is working correctly.

Domain Validation for MailPace on Clever Cloud

• Access the Clever Cloud console.
• Select the MailPace add-on.
• Go to the MailPace dashboard.
• Add and validate the domain mydomain.ltd.
• Follow MailPace's instructions to add the necessary DNS records.
  
  clever deploy

Once Deployment is Complete

The application will be accessible at the URL defined in PHX_HOST.
You can then monitor the application through the Clever Cloud dashboard and adjust settings as needed.

Conclusion

This work around deploying Brinjel on Clever Cloud primarily demonstrates the flexibility and ease with which an open-source application can be adapted and hosted on a sovereign, high-performance, and resilient infrastructure.
The goal here is not to replicate an existing SaaS offering, but rather to showcase how a business tool can leverage a modern cloud to ensure its sustainability and scalability.

This approach fits into a logic of collaboration and open innovation: making software adoption easier, exploring new technical opportunities, and offering solutions tailored to the specific needs of users. Clever Cloud positions itself as a facilitator of these initiatives, providing reliable and optimized infrastructure.

A big thank you to André Hoarau, creator of Brinjel, for his work on this tool.
This proof-of-concept illustrates the adaptability of Clever Cloud’s solutions and paves the way for other open-source projects looking to benefit from high-performance and sovereign hosting.

If you would like to support the Brinjel project and its development, we encourage you to use its official SaaS version available on the Brinjel website.