Coding Architect

Sovereignty: Trust No Backup

Bas van de Sande — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 19:53:14 +0200

In a previous blog, I wrote how I replaced HyperBackup with Borgmatic. The reason was that my backups got corrupted and there was no way that I could repair it. Recently I noticed that new backup failures appeared in my mailbox, complaining about data integrity. This is the type of message I don’t want to see when it comes to backups. It looked like my backups were haunted again, time to go back to the drawing table to find out why my backups got corrupted.

Sovereignty: The Illusion of Security without Automation

Bas van de Sande — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When people talk about building their own cloud, they usually focus on the cool stuff: spinning up containers, creating sleek dashboards, and showing off a fancy setup. I have to confess I’m no different. There is a strange satisfaction in watching a new service launch on your own hardware without asking permission from Microsoft, Google, or who else in the world.

But here is the dirty little secret nobody talks about: If you don’t automate maintenance and security, you don’t have a private cloud. You just have a ticking time bomb running in your meter cupboard.

Sovereignty: A VPN Outside the Blast Radius

Bas van de Sande — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:15:57 +0200

While running outdoor, my mind has all the time of the world to reflect. During one of my recent runs, I was thinking of my sovereignty journey that progressed nicely. In the previous months I tackled a lot of hurdles such as power failure resiliency, robust storage, remote backup, minimal overhead, centralized monitoring and alerting, infrastructure as code, private networking, internet connectivity.

Despite of these successes, a little voice kept nagging in my head. What if the container runtime goes down? What if critical services go down? What if mounts become inaccessible or the reverse proxy stops? I tried to counter argue with myself by throwing arguments as “how big is the chance?”, “If I’m behind my laptop I can fix it”. While both arguments are fair, I realized that if there are serious problems, likely the VPN Server container is down as well. I found a major flaw in my setup. I was occupied the rest of the run. I hate to waste a good run… sigh

Sovereignty: Who is monitoring my cloud?

Bas van de Sande — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 22:20:58 +0200

Chaos, Chaos and Chaos. That’s how I want to describe Last week. How stupid could I be, neglecting maintenance on my servers. What possibly could go wrong!

I still get angry with myself over this rookie mistake. No matter what platform, there is always systems maintenance that needs to be done in the background. On the other hand, as being cloud native, this was something to be expected. On the hyperscalers, maintenance is done in the background, tucked away from the end user.

Sovereignty: Is there a SysAdmin in the room?

Bas van de Sande — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 23:03:53 +0200

For months my private cloud ran like a charm, suddenly my Gitea runners stopped working. In the runner output I noticed the message that my disk was full. Pocket‑ID, my identity provider, had some occasional hick‑ups. This slow decay of my cloud started the day I launched the individual services, no magic fairies that kept my cloud in a pristine condition. I omitted the obvious, I omitted some old skool system administration. Something that you get for free if you use one of the big hyperscalers.

Sovereignty: Getting control over your Source Control

Bas van de Sande — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 23:14:23 +0200

Don’t get me wrong, both GitHub and Azure DevOps are fantastic development platforms. They have only one small problem that doesn’t fit my journey toward digital sovereignty: they fall under United States jurisdiction.

This means that in the end, I don’t have full control over the intellectual property I store there. And at the end of the day I need to be sure that I have access to my source code, no matter what.

Bye Bye OneDrive

Bas van de Sande — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:57:50 +0200

One of the features that drew me initially to the cloud was the idea of having your information at your fingertips. As long as I had an internet connection, I had access to my documents and media. No matter where I was, no matter the occasion, no matter the time of day. Just open a browser, and I could pick up exactly where I left off.

For me, that magic started around 2005 when I began working with SharePoint. At the time, it felt revolutionary. Fast‑forward a few years and OneDrive entered the scene: a cloud‑based file system built on top of SharePoint’s foundations.

Sovereignty: Identity Confirmed!

Bas van de Sande — Mon, 25 May 2026 13:40:19 +0200

As you may know, I’m working my way out of American BigTech. A journey that is more complex than it seems at a first glance. There are so many choices that you need to make, such as hosting, technology stacks, containerization, storage, backup and restore strategies, continuous delivery etcetera. All of this need to be in place before you even can think of deploying your workloads. At this moment I almost reached the phase in which I can start deploying my workloads.

Backups: The Illusion of Safety

Bas van de Sande — Mon, 11 May 2026 10:54:19 +0200

Something was very, very wrong.

Every day, for weeks, the same two emails landed in my inbox: Backup failed. Data corrupted. At first, I ignored them. Big mistake.

A corrupted backup is, in many ways, worse than having no backup at all. You think you’re protected—until the moment you actually need it. That’s when false confidence turns into real risk.

Time to get this sorted out, once and for all.

Sovereignty: When the lights go out!

Bas van de Sande — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:54:19 +0200

No matter how meticulously you set up your infrastructure, a power grid failure will take your servers down, unless you have a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) to keep things running. A UPS takes over the power supply, until its battery runs out.
But here’s the catch: even the best UPS is pointless if your services don’t restart automatically when power returns.

I recently put this to the test while installing a car charger at home. For science and out of curiosity, I unplugged the main power line feeding the UPS. The UPS took over instantly, and the Lenovo server, network equipment, and the Synology NAS kept running smoothly.

Sovereignty: Core infrastructure

Bas van de Sande — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 21:54:19 +0200

We’ve forgotten how to build things ourselves.

The public cloud is like a dealer: you pay for what you need, when you need it. It’s very convenient, but you’re trapped. Trapped in their ecosystem, their rules, their pricing, their price bumps. Escaping that trap requires some serious planning. It’s about answering the hard questions: What hardware do you use? What do you repurpose, what do you buy? Which stack do you trust? How do you manage it all? And most importantly: What are the principles you refuse to compromise on?

Sovereignty: the first steps

Bas van de Sande — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:58:49 +0200

The 1984 Apple commercial is legendary!

A young girl throws a hammer into a screen, breaking the control of corporate power. When I started writing this blog about sovereignty, that image popped into my head. Sovereignty, or digital sovereignty, is a term we hear a lot these days. What does it actually mean? And why is everyone talking about it?

At first, I thought it was just about making sure personal data doesn’t fall under the US Cloud Act, which allows the US government to access it. But that’s not what digital sovereignty is really about.

Revamping my blog in a changing world

Bas van de Sande — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:31:42 +0100

The world we live in is changing at a rapid pace. Not only technologically, but also geopolitically. As a kid, I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s — a time when tensions between the West and the East were high, with both sides threatening to obliterate each other using nuclear missiles. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, East and West found more common ground, and the fear of mutual destruction began to fade.

The Art of Conversation

Bas van de Sande — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 14:39:51 +0100

In the 1990’s when I did my bachelor in computer science, teachers told us that we would be replaced by 4GL languages. Languages in which end-users would describe how applications should work. At that time we laughed at them, saying we saw the exact opposite. Oh dear, we were right. Code became complexer, new concepts arrived on the horizon and software development matured. Fast forward to the 2020’s…

Over the last year, I’ve been giving a lot of GitHub Copilot training sessions world wide. Sessions in which I learned the attendees what GitHub Copilot could mean for them and how they could get the most out of it. In that time I noticed that I was particular a fan of GitHub Copilot chat. A Chat interface in which I could talk to my bestie, asking him all kinds of questions. My bestie would answer my questions as good as possible.

Quick tip: Get in control by using your GitHub context

Bas van de Sande — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 15:35:43 +0100

GitHib actions and workflows are very powerful by nature. They help me to build and deploy my Azure environments, without having me to do all the tedious and errorprone work. I create a pull request, have it peer reviewed and once approved my environments are provisoned the way I envisioned it. This is also the case at my current assignment for a large organization. Last year the organization decided that a new change management system (which name I refuse to pronounce) should handle all changes. This means that every step in the process needs to be documented and approved conform ITIL processes.

Quick tip: Find permissions in RBAC roles easily

Bas van de Sande — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 19:00:52 +0100

When building infrastructures in Azure, you sometimes come to a point in which you need to add an additional action to a RBAC role in order to access certain Azure resources. In our case we needed to add read permissions on the Front Door activity logs to an internal security administrator role. The way I used to do it, was browing MS-learn to can find a comprehensive list of built-in roles. For me this was a cumberstone process, until today. One of my co-workers - Martin Bouchery - showed me an easy trick to find all RBAC roles in Azure that have a specific action tied to its profile. A walk through…

Where is that documentation? A tale on setting up diagnostic settings...

Bas van de Sande — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 10:54:52 +0200

I’m a big fan of Azure and building infrastructure on it using IaC (Infrastructure as Code) and deploy it through pipelines (Azure DevOps) or workflows (Github). The last two years, I primarily used Bicep to build the infrastructure. This is often a very satisfying experience but in some cases it can be quite frustrating. Frustrating because I can’t find the information that I need in the MS Learn documentation at the location where I would expect it to be.

A nightmare on FrontDoor in Bicep...

Bas van de Sande — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 22:36:57 +0200

For some reason I seem to attract the most exotic scenarios when it comes to building Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This time it was no different. For a client I’m working on building an environment in which disaster recovery is a top priority. Besides being zone redundant, the client requires region redundancy as well, in case a complete Azure region gets wiped out by a disaster or a combination of disasters… My imagination gets triggered and I envision all kinds of apocalyptic movie scenarios.

Note to self: fix invalid GitHub credentials in VSCode

Bas van de Sande — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 20:58:18 +0100

From time to time I start working on projects for new customers. As soon as I start I receive an invitation from Github to join the customer’s Github organization. Most of the organization have a SAML based single sign on (SSO). After joining the organization using my personal Github account, I’m able to work on the repositories on which I have access. So far so good…

Then the moment comes that I need to clone the repository, which can be a hassle from time-to-time. Normally I clone the repository using VSCode. After cloning the repository, I start working by adding my own features.

GHAS - How to use CodeQL custom queries?

Bas van de Sande — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 18:58:18 +0100

Over the last two years, I have seen a growing awareness when it comes to zero trust computing. When organizations look at zero trust computing, the first thing that comes into mind is getting the infrastructure secure. Assuming breach, ensuring that there are multiple layers of security applied. As an engineer I love seeing this growing awareness. What a lot of organizations seem to forget is that perhaps the most important part of securing its data starts with analyzing the source code of its proprietary software.

How to prepare for the Azure Cybersecurity Architect SC-100 exam

Bas van de Sande — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 13:18:54 +0100

Frustration! If one word should describe the learning experience using Microsoft Learn (other words could have been: indigestable, wut?!, uncohesive etcetera). I have never encountered a Microsoft Learning path that was so hard to digest. Then you could ask yourself: “Is the subject that hard?”. It is not the subject, it is the way the self-study was written. In this blog post, I will share the way I prepared for this exam.

Project Volterra - Windows Dev Kit 2023 - take 1

Bas van de Sande — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 13:20:25 +0200

At Xpirit we have an Innovation Day multiple times per year. The idea of an Innovation Day is to work on technologies or topics that spark your interest. Anything is allowed, as long as it has nothing to do with any customer assignments. Learning and knowledge sharing is the goal of such a day.

At our last Innovation Day in november, I picked up the idea to get some hands on experience with the Windows Dev Kit 2023 also known as Project Volterra. Technology minded as we are, we purchased two of these boxes at the office for experimentation (big shout out to @marcelv).

Minikube, a lightweight Kubernetes-to-go!

Bas van de Sande — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 13:20:25 +0200

From time-to-time I find myself tinkering with Kubernetes. I love the idea that I can create any type of workload (e.g. a simple webapp or a backend service), pick it up and put it somewhere else to run. Not having to care if it is in the cloud or on an on-premise cluster. However developing your application, testing its core in a local docker container and then deploying it to kubernetes can sometimes be cumberstone.

Real world mocking! Http Service testing in C# using Wiremock.Net

Bas van de Sande — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 14:09:18 +0200

At Xpirit we have a culture of never ending learning. One of the best ways of learning new things, is by doing it. To take the plunge and do the deep dive.

In this case my colleague Kristoff Riebbels learned me some new tricks by introducing me into the world of WireMock.Net. Together we wrote a magazine article for Xpirit Magazine #13.

In this blog post I want to share this article with you. The magazine can be downloaded from the link above.

Just do it! Work on your certifications.

Bas van de Sande — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 15:08:19 +0200

If you asked me 5 years ago if I would do any Microsoft exam, I would have told you that getting certified is something that you need to do at the start of your career. Besides that I would have told you that once your work experience and technical influence increases, you can rely on your seniority. I have to admit that for a long time I could get away with using the correct buzzwords at the correct moment supported by a certain arrogance.

Over-The-Air device update - IoT with C#

Bas van de Sande — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 12:32:35 +0200

Developing solutions for IoT devices can be a challenging task, this can also apply for getting a device at its final destination in order to do its job. When time passes by, it is likely that either requirements or conditions are changing and that the device is not capable anymore of doing its job. In other words, it needs to be updated. This is where the real problems may start. In many cases devices are not physically accessible or there are simply too many devices in the field to do manual updates. This is where over-the-air (OTA) updates will save your day.

Techorama Antwerp 2022, human connection

Bas van de Sande — Thu, 26 May 2022 16:15:48 +0200

Techorama is a conference that has long been on my list of conferences to attend, but for some reason I never went. Looking back I think I had this idea that world class conferences could only be held in the US (or in a place far-far away from home) with thousands of visitors. I was dead wrong. What the organizers understood perfectly is that in order to have a world class conference, you should offer the same smooth, convenient and rich experience with the very best speakers, but then at a smaller scale.

Register ESP32 to DPS & IoT hub - IoT with C#

Bas van de Sande — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 21:09:06 +0200

In my previous post I flashed my ESP32 with the nanoframework.net, allowing me to write C# code in Visual Studio with all bells and whistles. As life goes… the device landed in my drawer until this week where I had some time to experiment. This time I wanted to hook up the device to Azure IoT hub using the Device Provisioning Service (DPS) which brings me one step closer to my goal, performing device updates over-the-air…

From 0 to 100 in 30 minutes - IoT with C#

Bas van de Sande — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 20:28:06 +0200

My interest for the Internet of Things (IoT) was sparked many moons ago, way before the name was born. Back in the days I wrote software for PalmOS devices, and I was intrigued by having raw processor power in my Pocket. Don’t get me wrong, back then we where talking Megahertz instead of Gigahertz and Kilobyte instead of Gigabyte. Having such limitations in processing power and memory tickled my creativity. When I had the opportunity to control hardware (gps, electronic locks etc) using the little devices I was sold. Fastforward to a couple of years ago when the market was flooded with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, I picked up an old hobby and started developing again, this time playing around with sensors. The big disadvantage was that you had to resort to plain old C and a crippled development environment, until now…

Running a persistent SQL Server in Docker

Bas van de Sande — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 17:46:30 +0200

In IT we always want to work with the latest and greatest, it’s in our DNA to explore new technologies. From time-to-time you get confronted with legacy technologies, robust but boring. One of such things is a piece of software I wrote more than 15 years ago for a friend. It was an application using a SQL Server database that controlled a couple of weighing terminals connected over RS232. Controlling machines is every geek’s dream. Every couple of years my friend asks me if I can help him to improve the software I wrote for him, this time it was no different.

Note to self: localhost in kestrel is localhost

Bas van de Sande — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 17:20:25 +0200

In one of the projects I’m involved in, I ran into a problem. In this project we are building a solution that is running on a Linux based Edge Device connected to Azure. On the Edge device, a k3s cluster hosts a number of services required by the solution. In order to be able to develop and debug on a Linux environment, I equiped my system with Hyper-V, an internal NAT switch and a fresh copy of Ubuntu.

Sometimes you need to reboot...

Bas van de Sande — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 11:31:42 +0100

Almost a year ago I created this blog… I mean not exactly this blog, but its predecessor “blog.somethingazure.com”. I thought that the name did match the content. Fast Forward a couple of months in time…. I learned that my job as Azure Coding Architect involved quite a few more technology areas than just Azure. Furthermore I was not happy with the look-and-feel of the blog; it was visually not attractive. Time for a major overhaul!

Multi-staged GitHub Pipeline

Bas van de Sande — Sat, 11 Sep 2021 19:46:30 +0200

At the moment I’m working on some infrastructure pipelines to build and deploy Azure infrastructure for one of our clients. For me a cool project as I’m learning to work with technologies such as Bicep and GitHub actions. In this project we use GitHub actions for the CI/CD process. In this process every time a pull request is merged in the main branch, an automated build, test and deployment process is triggered.

Certification Renewal

Bas van de Sande — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 19:30:08 +0200

When Microsoft introduced the new role based certifaction paths, a new expiration policy was set as well. After two years (as of july 2021, one year) the certification will expire, and you have to renew it in order to keep it.

At the time, I was among the first people who passed the new certifications and back then the new expiration policy was unclear. There was no information on how to renew the certifications and costs involved, until a few weeks ago…

DevOps All the Way

Bas van de Sande — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 09:00:06 +0200

In Practice what you preach I wrote that I decided to host my blog on the Azure platform, using Hugo as content management system, Blob Storage and Azure CDN for hosting the blog. The only thing lacking is a workflow of writing content, approving it and publishing it on the web.

As I work for a company that specialized on Azure and DevOps, I decided to take the plunge and go DevOps all the way. Doing some googling, I found out that there were some great tutorials out there to use an Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline in combination with Hugo to compile and publish the blog. As a starter I followed this writing by kurtmkurtm.

Practice what you preach!

Bas van de Sande — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 10:14:26 +0200

When I decided to start blogging again, I knew I wanted to talk about the things I face, working with Azure. In the past I used to blog as well, back then I blogged on my Journey into CRM which I started in 2014.

In 2014 the state of technology was much different; one would use WordPress (or similar). The main choice was host it yourself or host it at a hosting provider. Back then I chose the way of hosting it myself on a small linux appliance from my basement.

Introduction

Bas van de Sande — Sat, 24 Jul 2021 12:20:25 +0200

You have found my personal blog. This blog will be focused around Microsoft Azure technologies, hence the name “something Azure”. Let me introduce myself, my name is Bas van de Sande and I work as an Azure Coding Architect at Xpirit in the Netherlands.

As part of my daily job, I offer technical guidance, advice and hands-on assistance for a large number of (global) companies in various industries.

I have been working with Microsoft technologies since 1995 in various technical roles, since that time I have seen a large number of technologies passing by (Visual Studio technologies, SQL Server, BizTalk, Microsoft.Net, SharePoint, Dynamics CE etc). In one of my former jobs I have been doing product development on the Dynamics CE platform annd back then I used to blog very actively on my journey into CRM. Over the years I came to realize, that the continuous story of my life is system integration.