Matt Johnson
CTO, UBDS Group
Matt has been working with AWS technology since 2011, including 8.5 years at AWS itself; first as a Solutions Architect, and then in a Chief Technologist role for the UK public sector team. During that time he has presented at 6 separate re:Invents and dozens of other AWS and 3rd party events, covering a range of topics including: networking, DNS, cost optimisation, and the Amazon Culture of Innovation. Now as CTO of UBDS Group, Matt continues to help customers make use of cloud to deliver great outcomes for the public sector and beyond.
Digital sovereignty is about more than data location and security. Geopolitical instability, regulatory intervention and jurisdictional risk mean that availability, control and freedom of action are becoming important architectural considerations too. The first half of this session will explore what sovereignty means for technologists, why conventional multi-region resilience doesn't necessarily address these risks, and when organisations should care.
The second half gets technical: we'll explore how the AWS European Sovereign Cloud could provide a sovereign failover capability for existing AWS workloads. We'll look at deployment and data patterns, failover approaches, and the dependencies that can make or break the design, including DNS, SSO and identity, certificates, secrets, CI/CD and external services. The aim is to show what it takes to build a workload that can continue operating when the failure isn't a server, AZ or region, but access to the cloud environment itself.
