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Blog

# Engineering

Architecture decisions, performance, and how we build ZCP.

Engineering

May 16, 2026

### [What is software-defined networking (SDN)?](https://zsoftly.ca/blog/what-is-software-defined-networking)

SDN separates the control plane from the data plane. A technical primer on the ONF definition, OpenFlow, and why cloud networking is impossible without it.

Engineering

May 16, 2026

### [What is sovereign cloud?](https://zsoftly.ca/blog/what-is-sovereign-cloud)

Sovereign cloud explained as a category, not a feature. Data residency, operational sovereignty, and corporate sovereignty, and why procurement now asks.

Engineering

May 14, 2026

### [How We Built ZCP: Proxmox, Ceph, and CloudStack](https://zsoftly.ca/blog/our-infrastructure-stack)

A look inside ZCP's infrastructure stack. Why we chose open-source components, how they fit together, and what it means for reliability and performance.

Engineering

April 23, 2026

### [Two Lessons From Running OPNsense in Production](https://zsoftly.ca/blog/opnsense-bare-metal-lessons)

We ran OPNsense as a VM on network-defined storage and watched a single switch fault cascade into a cluster-wide outage. Two lessons we will not relearn: put your firewall on bare metal, and if you must virtualize it, keep the disk local.

Engineering

March 23, 2026

### [Full AWS Observability With Open Source Tools](https://zsoftly.ca/blog/full-aws-observability-open-source)

CloudWatch gives you metrics. It does not give you actionable dashboards, historical trends, or alerts. We built a four-container open source stack that turns raw AWS data into full observability — no agents on app servers, no licensing costs, auto-discovery via AWS tags.

Engineering

March 9, 2026

### [Why We Moved From SigNoz to the Grafana Stack](https://zsoftly.ca/blog/signoz-to-grafana-stack)

We picked SigNoz for its OpenTelemetry-native approach. A few months in, we moved to Prometheus, Loki, Alertmanager, and Grafana, with Grafana Alloy as the single collection agent. Here is the honest breakdown.