# CELLARS

> A cellular infrastructure model where each geo-bound cell inherits its compliance controls from the platform, turning a new sovereign region from months of bespoke work into weeks.

2025–2026 · Senior Principal Architect, Palo Alto Networks · tags: platform, sovereignty, compliance, gcp, aws

Source: https://brandonbjelland.com/projects/cellars/

## The problem

Regulated and government customers need guarantees that their data and compute stay inside national
borders. The easy trap is letting each big deal spin up its own one-off region. Do that a few times and
you own a pile of snowflakes, each with its own compliance story.

## The approach

I designed CELLARS around one primitive, the **cell**: a secure, geo-bound unit of infrastructure
confined to a single country. Compliance controls are inherited from the platform rather than rebuilt
per region, so a new region is mostly a matter of configuration instead of a code fork.

A few deliberate choices made it work:

- **Declarative everything.** Product teams describe their infrastructure using the Kubernetes resource
  model (Config Connector), and the network layer is declared through the
  [network-as-code providers](https://brandonbjelland.com/projects/network-as-code-providers/).
- **Sequencing to de-risk, not to chase revenue.** The first cell was a proving ground. I accepted a
  known tradeoff there (a later network migration) to validate the model fast, then expanded to the
  regions whose teams could move quickest.
- **Making sovereignty a platform capability.** Working with compliance, we turned ambiguous,
  non-uniform legal requirements into a reusable control set instead of a per-deal negotiation.

## Outcome

- Standing up a new country went from a months-long bespoke project to a repeatable cell measured in
  weeks: roughly a week of platform work plus service-team integration.
- Multiple sovereign regions in production, with the expansion pace set by demand rather than engineering.
- I grew the core team from four to seven engineers and built CELLARS to outlast me: four of them
  co-own it today, which let me step back into an advisory role.

CELLARS grew out of [PASTA](https://brandonbjelland.com/projects/pasta-and-sauce/), the single-tenant automation I built at
Protect AI. Workloads ship into cells through [HERBS](https://brandonbjelland.com/projects/herbs/).