“Computers matter.” Say it today and you provoke scarcely any dissent — and scarcely any notice. Too self-evident, too obvious. Yet what we mean by it is no longer what one would first suspect.
I am not speaking of the computer as typewriter, as gateway to the internet, as screen for streaming services. I am speaking of a quality that borders on the provocative: the union of what one nowadays calls a personal computer with a system like Linux. Of a certain measure of rawness.
The rawness that repels
The absence of a graphical interface unsettles the typical computer user — the mouse-jockey the terminal user sneers at anyway. Naturally a desktop Linux today is mostly such a mouse-jockey system too, but only to the degree one desires. Linux enthusiasts often favour the keyboard, because it is a many-dimensional input device — even compared to the mouse alone. Venture the comparison to a mobile device and the gap widens further: two thumbs on glass, a third of the screen consumed by a keyboard the apparatus paints itself. That is not an input device. That is a compromise.
It is precisely this quality from which computer users recoil when one proposes they could use Linux. What repels these people is precisely what fascinates me most. How can that be?
It is the purity already spoken of here. I play an m4a audio file in the terminal — with mpv. The outcome is not graphical but wholly textual. Why not, one might think. Well, I confess: as an Apple user of the nineties I was somewhat spoiled back then. I struggled to accept that a computer could do this at all — play music without erecting a window, without drawing an interface. The notion lay so far from me that only through Linux did I learn it was maximally one-dimensional. A computer can do far more than its surface implies.
Tools that widen the mind
This is inevitably only one example. It is meant to convey how flexible computers are — and how deeply my thinking is shaped by the tools I use daily. There is ssh: I log into a machine on the other side of the world and drive it as though I sat before it. There are pipes, chaining small, foolish tools into a shrewd one — curl | jq | sort | uniq -c — answering in a single line what a spreadsheet would need half an hour for. There is ffmpeg, re-encoding a video file without anyone needing to see a window to inspect the result.
Linux widened my horizon. It is a fairly raw operating system, and that is well. It is cut out for people like me who wish to hold as much power as possible. At first that is only power over a computer. But there came to be ever more of these devices over which one wielded it — and suddenly they danced to my music. Tools like Ansible were for the military roughly what the invention of the automatic rifle had been: what a trained marksman once delivered, a machine now produced, multiplied. Kubernetes, by contrast, is more a railgun on auto-fire. More than merely dangerous. It aligns itself, it fires itself, it strikes itself — and the human who set it up is no longer present at every shot.
Power that nobody notices
What started small, with me, now concerns us all. The further we refine the tools, the more powerful they grow. They make us, their users, more powerful. They even empower those who ultimately use these systems without any inkling of it. Gamers reap the benefit enormously today. Game servers used to fold readily and swiftly whenever a release dropped. That still happens — but nowhere near as swiftly. Game servers are run on Kubernetes. For each game another pod joins, and when the existing machines or VMs fall short of capacity, further ones are scheduled in. At night, as traffic ebbs, systems are discarded, pods vanish, the bill falls.
Mind you, this comfort is paid for so handsomely that one likely spends more than one would renting mere servers. Still, the ability to spin up twenty times as many game servers inside twelve hours is a luxury that formerly simply did not exist — whatever one might have been willing to pay.
In the end the world becomes a different place for all of us, whether we deal with Kubernetes directly or at arm’s length. Whoever is not incidentally a gamer uses the large social-media applications, or indeed banking apps. None of it would be conceivable today without Kubernetes. Our power swells — and with it our responsibility, for:
Sovereign, not self-evident
By now Kubernetes is no exoticism one rents only from the hyperscalers. It has become a matter of course — and rightly so. It runs on premise, in one’s own data centre. It runs in the private cloud. And it runs in the Sovereign Cloud, the segment that has grown rapidly in recent years — and whose importance the market signals unmistakably.
Those who need data sovereignty, who refuse to fall under the US CLOUD Act, who demand European-law guarantees instead of American fine print, find genuine alternatives today. STACKIT, from the Schwarz Group, is actively building a European hyperscaler. noris network of Nuremberg operates the noris Sovereign Cloud on the open Sovereign Cloud Stack. IONOS, pluscloud open, OVHcloud, Hetzner — all have understood that sovereignty is not a nice-to-have but a decision criterion. Their common denominator: open standards, European law, full control over one’s own keys. Precisely this combination makes Kubernetes on a Sovereign Cloud what it should be: a powerful tool in the right hands.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Whoever crafts tools more powerful than their forebears puts power into hands that may not gauge it. Whoever operates them shoulders the consequences. And whoever merely uses them trusts that someone else has taken on the responsibility — someone who knows what they are talking about. libcom.de has been that someone for over two decades: from the bare terminal through Ansible to Kubernetes clusters keeping banks, telecommunications firms, hospitals and industrial deployments running — on premise, in the Private Cloud and in the Sovereign Cloud. If you wonder whether your IT ought to be rawer, more direct, more powerful — or whether it bears the responsibility that has grown upon it: write to us at contact@libcom.de. We speak plainly about what will bear weight and what will not.