Golem Trust’s own list

The listing in Milan was drawn up to decide who could be cut off. Golem Trust, whose whole business is not being the thing that gets cut off, drew the opposite list, its own, layer by layer, to find where it in turn could be cut off and close what it could. A ticked box is a thing done. An empty box is a thing known and not yet done, which is worth more than a thing neither known nor done. The firm starts further along than most, a European substrate already, but its hardest box, the one operator under the primary, may be the last it ever fully closes, and the list says so rather than ticking it out of optimism.

Name and DNS

  • The zone off Cloudflare and onto a European operator, DNSSEC on, the proxy gone so no US company terminates the TLS

  • Geo-failover moved off the US load balancer to the European operator or its own resolvers

  • The name itself left on the city’s own registry, where it always was

Substrate

  • Disaster recovery and backups at a second operator that shares nothing with Hetzner, encrypted before they leave

  • The platform kept portable by design: vanilla Kubernetes, open storage, an open backup format, Hetzner behind an interface

  • A genuinely independent second region off Hetzner for live production, the multi-year gap the move does not close

Mail

  • Internal alerts on its own relay, not a foreign provider’s

  • The few alerts that have to leave the network on a European provider, with Fastmail out of the path

Identity

  • The identity provider its own and self-hosted, not a tenant of any landlord

  • The customer’s Microsoft edge bounded, scoped and named as the customer’s, not put under its own identity

  • The detection bait moved off SharePoint onto tripwires it hosts itself

Supply chain

  • The forge and its runners self-hosted, no shared runners from a US platform

  • Base images pinned by digest and served from its own mirror, not pulled live

  • Artefacts signed and carrying provenance

  • The internal package mirror completed, one job’s worth of packages at a time

Tools

  • The US open-core tools ranked by what leaving each would cost on the quarter the licence turns

  • The secrets manager’s replacement identified, a foundation-governed fork under an open licence

  • The swaps for the access and logging tools piloted beside the originals, not only listed

Who can say no

  • Every layer’s upstream company set on one table, alongside the customers below

  • Its own place set down plainly: the shared floor under much of the Circle Sea, with fewer of its own supports foreign than before, and no pretence that reducing them makes it less of a floor

Magrat keeps a list of everything that might go wrong, reads it before bed, and is never surprised in the morning, only, now and then, thoroughly vindicated.