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Data Inventories in the EU Data Act: The Democratization of IoT Devices

Starting in September 2025, the EU Data Act (Regulation (EU) 2023/2854) will require companies that collect or process data from connected devices to maintain comprehensive data inventories.

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EU Data Act: The Beginning of the End for Cloud Monoculture?

What has the EU ever done for us? …well, aside from free movement, no roaming charges, consumer protection, the single market, Erasmus, and more. But also: excessive bureaucracy, slow decisions, overregulation down to the much-mocked bottle cap – a favorite symbol for anyone blaming Europe for every innovation shortfall.

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Digital Sovereignty as Self-Understanding

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Think Locally: On-Premise LLMs as Drivers of Competitive Advantage

Consider this scenario: Your organisation has integrated AI tools into critical business processes, your legal team has carefully reviewed data processing agreements, and your IT department has configured systems to comply with GDPR requirements. Then, a foreign court issues an order that overrides all these protections, requiring your AI provider to indefinitely retain data that should be deleted—including potentially sensitive corporate information shared by your employees.

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Software Analytics going crAIzy!

I’ve long been an advocate of treating software like data and analyzing it accordingly with tools like Python, pandas, Jupyter Notebook, Neo4j, and jQAssistant. In the era of AI and code transformation tools, seeing software as data gets more and more important when you want to improve your software system at a large scale. This blog post is a short interim report from me about my efforts taking software analysis to the next level.

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The Sovereignty Trap: Between Tiananmen and Trump

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Updating OWASP’s Microservice Security Cheat Sheet: Practical Considerations & Recommendations

Turning principles and patterns into practice — just as promised.

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From Data Graveyards to Knowledge Landscapes

Europe is sitting on a wealth of public data—but much of its potential remains untapped. The challenges are well known: fragmented portals, incompatible interfaces, and growing reliance on non-European platforms that slow innovation. While new industrial data spaces are emerging—enabling secure and sovereign exchange of sensitive information—public and industrial data ecosystems remain largely siloed. This article explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) can help bridge that gap and accelerate Europe’s shift from Open Data to Open Knowledge—supporting digital sovereignty and delivering greater value to society.

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Updating OWASP’s Microservice Security Cheat Sheet: Decision Dimensions for Authorization Patterns

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Updating OWASP’s Microservice Security Cheat Sheet: Authorization Patterns

Authorization patterns explain how distributed systems organize their access control — where and how decisions happen, where policies live — and influence, in turn, how identities and related attributes travel between components.

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Updating OWASP’s Microservice Security Cheat Sheet: Identity Propagation Patterns

Without trustworthy identity propagation, even strong initial authentication can be undermined — weakening trust boundaries and ultimately impairing the system’s ability to make reliable authorization decisions.

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AI — Behind the Buzzword Garbage

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Updating OWASP’s Microservice Security Cheat Sheet: Authentication Patterns

Without knowing who the subject is, without verifying its identity, there is only a limited way to perform meaningful access decisions.

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What’s Wrong with the Current OWASP Microservice Security Cheat Sheet?

Modern microservice architectures require evolving security practices. Yet popular resources like the OWASP Microservice Security Cheat Sheet are starting to show their age and need a fresh look.

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Updating OWASP’s Microservice Security Cheat Sheet: Core Concepts

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First Agile, Then Agentic

Agentic AI is supposed to accelerate software development. But new technologies can only reach their full potential when organizations adapt their structure, processes, and culture. Most organizations today are not yet able to truly benefit from faster software development. The prerequisite for this are the capabilities shaped by the agile and DevOps movements.

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Context Engineering

Have you ever wondered how chatbots, copilots, or virtual assistants seem to know just the right things to say — or sometimes, spectacularly fail? The difference often comes down to one crucial skill: context engineering.

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Technical and other Debt in IT Systems

A Broad Perspective

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Enabling Stakeholders as a Success Factor

Sociotechnical architectures consider both technical and human-organizational aspects and promote their effective collaboration. To ensure the successful design and implementation of these systems, it is crucial to actively involve stakeholders and address their interests. In this article, we explore why enabling stakeholders represents a key function in sociotechnical projects and how you can implement this approach effectively.

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Don’t Forget the People

On paper, the architecture vision is perfect. It addresses all pressing deficiencies of the existing system, aligns seamlessly with the business domain, and enables teams to retain more work within their boundaries. Finally, we will enjoy higher speed-to-market and a significant reduction in (non-value-adding, tedious) coordination efforts between teams. Surely, everyone will immediately see how much better our new architectural vision is. Not quite.

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Internal Development Platforms

Shift Down Instead of Shift Left

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Common Approaches in the Field of Socio-Technical Architectures

In the age of digitalization and modernization, companies face the challenge of not only keeping up with technological advancements but also optimizing their organizational structures. Socio-technical architectures play a crucial role in this process by focusing on the flow of work, team collaboration, and the seamless integration of technical and social systems. This article explores two key approaches—Team Topologies and Domain-Driven Design (DDD)—and demonstrates how they can help organizations take the first steps toward consciously designing their socio-technical architecture.

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How Much Thinking Can a Team Handle?

The term Cognitive Load has become a common reference point in recent discussions about team structures, roles, and task distribution in IT organizations. However, these discussions often fail to distinguish between the different purposes of IT organizations and frequently rely on an oversimplified concept of Cognitive Load.

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Socio-Technical Architectures: Informality from Mining to Today

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Infrastructure in architectural documentation

Most people are familiar with the principles of good architecture documentation. However, the infrastructure often goes unnoticed or is only understood by a few “experts”. Especially with complex systems, it is important to record solution concepts and decisions at the infrastructure level of an application in order to be able to understand the architecture and further develop the software. This article is aimed at development teams that have difficulties integrating infrastructure topics into their documentation. It also offers insights for platform engineers and cross-functional teams who are responsible for their own infrastructure.