2026-08-27 –, Talerteltet
Last year I pitched a dream: Everyone needs a cloud in their basement. A Trusted Automated, fully Private Platform as a Service. On commodity hardware - your data, your hardware, no hidden fees, no relyance on closed source, no relyance on the Internet.
A year later and 1091 commits later I am ready to give you the messy proof that it is real - and to make the case you should build one too.
The Good: it runs. A real Proxmox/NixOs/OPNsense cluster, 8 services live, and one surprise - my basement now holds its own AI, local LLMs, private and offline, answering with the network cable pulled. Self-hosted intelligence that belongs to you not a hyperscaler
The Bad: what self hosting actually costs if you are not smart about it. The brutal commit graph of a side project. The iceberg of plumbing beneath every simple Service.
The Ugly: The confession: I am using AI to construct it, and I gave the AI root access to every node. I will elaborate on how I controlled this process and how I still believe I am in control :-)
Lars Rossen: former enterprise and cloud architect at OpenText, MicroFocus and Hewlett Packard. I am trying hard to retire, but I can not help spending 40 hours a week fighting for European Sovereignty and resiliency. see more at tappaas.org (work in progress) or sovereigncomputing.org
