NERD. Notes

Insights, stories, and highlights from the NERD. Community

Foundations that hold, even when your cloud provider doesn't

By Mark Gerrits · Oct 1, 2026 · 14 min read

What happens to your checkout when your cloud provider has a bad day? For most retailers, the answer is: the same thing that happens to everyone else on that provider. We decided that wasn't good enough. In this Insight, Mark Gerrits explains how he built a unified commerce platform that keeps running when any single provider fails. Identical frontends are served from two independent CDNs, backend clusters are spread across clouds and regions, and traffic fails over in under a minute, without customers noticing. You'll learn: Why single-provider setups quietly cost you uptime, negotiating leverage, and flexibility | How multi-cloud can stay simple by building the same thing everywhere | How data residency and GDPR turn redundancy into a compliance advantage | How to rebuild your foundation without closing the store. Plus three questions to ask about every critical dependency in your own stack.

Community Insights

How Unified Commerce Platforms Turn Fiscal Compliance into Retail Readiness

Jord Sorgedrager · 12 min read

Right to Repair Laws and Retail Loyalty: What the Legislation Means for Customer Relationships

Tim van Duijn · 7 min read

How to Implement Ship from Store: A Store-Level Execution Guide

Daniele Nizzero · 10 min read

The Gesamtkunstwerk of Retail

Albert Visser · 4 min read

The Recognition Ladder: Why Nike, Sephora, and Strava Are Shifting Focus From Points to Recognition

Sofia Bilbao · 7 min read

Explore All Community Insights

The Voice of Frankenstack™

We moved to the cloud. Same integrations, now with a monthly invoice. (Hosting fragmented data elsewhere doesn't unify it.)

NERD. Spotlight

Rogier Vanhorick

Partner & Global CTO Indirect Tax @ Deloitte

I am a father of two girls and we currently live in the beautiful surroundings of Gouda in Reeuwijk on an island. I have worked for more than 30 years in taxation and am currently at Deloitte where I have the privilege of leading our indirect tax technology team and get to advise some of our Dutch pride multinationals on e-invoicing, e-reporting and digital tax transformation as a whole. I like to believe that whatever we have truly focused on from a Deloitte point of view has been innovative and out of the box. That is also why I have truly enjoyed working together with New Black who have always challenged us and the status quo which viewpoints and solution approach is beyond what our "normal" software clients would do. I have always been fascinated by New Black's purpose and the different way in which you operate and have designed the EVA platform.

Read Interview

Rare Achievement

Show & Tell

Badge awarded for sharing a definitely-not-AI photo ahead of the 15th

Mike Gretsch (Enterprise Architect at Red Wing Shoe Co.) just proved that you can cross the Atlantic before you've even boarded the plane. Maarten's extra legs were not available for comment.

Community News

Tier Progression

Nerds moved to the next tier in the last 30 days.

24 reached Builder

10 reached Innovator

193 badges in 30 days

The NERD. Autumn event on 15 October is for Builder tier and above only, and with that 193 badges were earned in the last 30 days by members working to get in.

NERD. Bites

The store window is now an AI chat

Your next customer might not visit your store. They'll ask their AI.

Reward Drop

Reward delivery is underway!

Deliveries are officially on their way! If you haven't added your shipping address to your profile yet, please do so now to ensure you receive your reward.