Chapter 12 / 17

How the system is built

The system uses two compute tiers.

Cloudflare handles the public websites, the data warehouse, the AI tool gateway, and the internal tools site. No hardware to manage, globally distributed, cheap.

The Framework Desktop (arriving this week, in the Gennevilliers server room) handles email, AI inference, voice transcription, and the nightly data processing from Sodiwin. Runs 24/7 on hardware Sodimo owns.

Tailscale connects the two — Thomas’s laptop, Rani’s laptop, Paul’s workstation, Jack’s workstation, the Framework Desktop, and the NAS are all on the same private network regardless of location.

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Why not put everything on the cloud?

Two reasons:

Email sovereignty. Hosting 33 mailboxes on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 costs over €300/month and leaves email under a third party’s control. That does not survive a Fattal group due-diligence review. Running mail on hardware Sodimo owns costs roughly the electricity for one machine.

AI cost. Running the full AI workload on Anthropic’s cloud would cost €1,640–2,500 per month. The hardware cost (€3,583) is recovered within the first two months against the cloud alternative.

The system escalates to cloud AI automatically when a task is high-stakes — a collection letter over €5,000, or when the local model flags low confidence. The expensive tier gets used where it matters, not by default.

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Credentials and backup:

Credentials are self-managed. The admin identity is admin@sodimo.eu. Critical credentials are written down and stored in Paul’s fire-safe. Jack and Paul both have emergency access.

The Framework Desktop backs up nightly to the Synology NAS. Cloudflare R2 holds an off-site copy. Full bare-metal restore from scratch in under two hours.