Startup: Personal Data Sovereignty in Building a Native Trustable Cloud

Designing prompt-engineered AI systems with CDN-native edge inference, routing, and secure delivery

LOCATION ADDRESS (Hybrid, in person or by zoom, you choose)
Valley Research Park
319 North Bernardo Avenue
Mountain View, CA CA 93043
Don't use the front door. When facing the front door, turn right along the front of the building. Turn left around the building corner. The 2nd door should be open and have a banner and event registration.

If you want to join remotely, you can submit questions via Zoom Q&A. The zoom link:
Zoom (updated 6:55 pm)
Join via YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO72Hb30fKw

AGENDA
6:30 Door opens, food and networking (we invite honor system contributions)
7:00 SFBayACM upcoming events, introduce the speaker
7:15 Speaker Presentation
8:30 - 8:45 finish, Volunteer recruiting Q&A

Join SF Bay ACM Chapter for an insightful discussion on:

### Abstract

Current cloud storage infrastructure is owned and controlled by corporations that set terms, hold data, and define access. This talk presents an alternative architectural pattern: a distributed, community-contributed cloud where individuals own their data, stored across volunteer-contributed nodes with no single point of corporate control.

We present a working implementation built on Python Flask microservices, Docker containerization, and MySQL, demonstrating four core capabilities:

1. Visual Personal Data Organization: A 5×5 grid interface that maps personal data across five dimensions of life, featuring a built-in public/private boundary and bilingual (English/Chinese) support. Gmail label integration allows existing personal taxonomies to be imported automatically as data tags.
2. Microservices Architecture: Defined service boundaries—including identity/authentication, personal archive storage, and an ontology service for tag mapping—designed for independent deployment across distributed volunteer hardware.
3. Volunteer Node Lifecycle Protocol: Unlike traditional distributed systems, this architecture is designed for planned voluntary participation. Volunteers agree to an SLA before joining. If a volunteer leaves, a grace period ensures all primary data is migrated before release. The system also handles unexpected failures via automatic replica promotion and manages growth through automatic rebalancing.
4. Personal Archive Management: Activation of a personal agent to serve as the Archive Manager.

We will demonstrate the use of Kubernetes orchestration for real volunteer nodes across public cloud and community hardware. This includes email routing, family heritage storage, and social group management, providing a complete personal data sovereignty stack owned entirely by its community.

### Keynote Takeaways

• Observe the usability of such a wall between authorship data, private data and archived data .
• Explore hardware and software backdoor tolerance on cloud implementation.
• Understand volunteer node ownership duty and rights
• Prominence of joining the development team with comments, labor, or financial support

Why This Talk Is Different
Most ACM Bay Area talks focus on published open technologies and experiences. This session goes into native cloud owned and operated by geographically closed in-person friends and relatives.

Speaker Bios:
Venkata Gopi Kolla - Software Engineer with 10 years of experience in distributed systems, and large-scale multi-tenant infrastructure, global CDN and edge platforms, where he has led traffic routing, security enforcement, caching, and performance optimization across Akamai, Cloudflare, and CloudFront to deliver reliable, high-throughput enterprise SaaS at internet scale. He is currently focused on edge-optimized delivery and security for generative and agentic AI workloads. He has been a committed volunteer at ACM San Francisco Bay Professional Chapter since 2025.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/venkata-gopi-kolla-8265a427/
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Valley Research Park is a coworking research campus of 104,000 square feet hosting 60+ life science and technology companies. VRP has over 100 dry labs, wet labs, and high power labs sized from 125-15,000 square feet. VRP manages all of the traditional office elements: break rooms, conference rooms, outdoor dining spaces, and recreational spaces.

As a plug-and-play lab space, once companies have secured their next milestone and are ready to expand, VRP has 100+ labs ready to expand into.
https://www.valleyresearchpark.com/