Sovereign Cloud: Who Really Owns Your Infrastructure? • Jake Warner & Charles Humble • GOTO 2026

This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted in May 2026. #GOTOcon #GOTO
https://gotopia.tech

Read the full transcription of this interview here:
https://gotopia.tech/articles/445

Jake Warner - Co-Founder & CEO at Cycle @JakeWarner 
Charles Humble - Freelance Techie, Podcaster, Editor, Author & Consultant

RESOURCES
Jake
https://bsky.app/profile/jakewarner.com
https://x.com/jakewarner
https://github.com/JakeWarner
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakewarner
https://jakewarner.com

Charles
https://bsky.app/profile/charleshumble.bsky.social
https://linkedin.com/in/charleshumble
https://mastodon.social/@charleshumble
https://conissaunce.com

Links
https://cycle.io
https://youtu.be/zOP_Dtwo1gs
https://youtu.be/GxTJ-3j9y0U
https://youtu.be/PHrUSpEydRM
https://youtu.be/Gq6eDt13uNU
https://youtu.be/2s_wnPo7cOc

DESCRIPTION
Jake Warner, co-founder and CEO of Cycle.io, traces a pattern he's watched repeat itself since his OpenStack days: a new orchestration technology arrives, developers adopt it enthusiastically, it grows in complexity, and organizations eventually ask whether managing it is really a core competency. He made a decade-long bet that Kubernetes would follow the same arc — and built Cycle as the answer: a distributed control plane that lets companies own their own infrastructure and compute while still getting a clean, platform-like experience on top of it. The key design principle is a high ceiling without sacrificing simplicity — companies shouldn't have to re-platform every time they grow, and they shouldn't have to give up infrastructure ownership to get ease of use.

The conversation then pivots to Sovereign Cloud, which Jake frames not as a niche regulatory concern but as a fundamental trust and ownership question. He draws attention to a risk many organizations underestimate: the control plane itself. Unlike many platforms where the control plane is a single point of failure and a blackbox, Cycle's architecture ensures that even if the control plane goes down, customer infrastructure keeps running — servers maintain their own manifests and restart containers independently. Looking ahead, Jake expects more regions and countries to build their own cloud equivalents, driven by privacy concerns, data residency laws, and geopolitical pressures that are accelerating faster than the technology is.

His conclusion: the organizations that handed AWS all the keys are beginning to realize the cost — and the industry is correcting.

TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
01:02 What Is Cycle & why bet against Kubernetes a decade ago?
03:30 Containers, VMs, Bare Metal — Why support all three?
08:27 European Control Plane
17:53 What's sovereign cloud?
24:40 What's next for Cycle?
26:03 The Control Plane trust problem
29:02 Will we end up with multiple Internets?
31:43 Outro

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Alan Hamilton • Sovereign Cloud Operations • https://amzn.to/4dqYAe4
Leonard J. Horta • The Cloud Exit Strategy • https://amzn.to/4dXqeiN
Charles Curry & Tanessa Curry • Cooling the Cloud • https://amzn.to/4a0d4iA
Liz Rice • Container Security • https://amzn.to/3oU4iJe
Liz Rice • Kubernetes Security • https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/kubernetes-security/9781492039075

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