2023 - 2024: Migrating to the cloud, but regulated 1/2
Role: Principal Cloud Architect
Customer: Boerse Stuttgart Group
Tasks:
- Led the comprehensive migration of Börse Stuttgart's on-premise systems to AWS, ensuring full compliance with regulatory frameworks such as BAIT, KRITIS, and other relevant German and European regulations.
- Played a key role in supporting audits according to BAIT and KRITIS, working closely with internal and external auditors to ensure compliance with legal and security frameworks.
- Initiated and led the cloud transformation initiative, engaging stakeholders, conducting workshops with AWS as the cloud provider, and establishing a longterm cloud migration strategy.
- Developed and implemented modern cloud-native methodologies, including the 12-Factor App principle and GitOps, to streamline operations and improve infrastructure scalability.
Skills:AWS - Terraform - Gitlab - Lambda - ECS - EC2 - Cloudflare - Okta - Cloudflare
Migrating to the cloud, but regulated 2/2
Role: Principal Cloud Architect
Customer: Boerse Stuttgart Group
Tasks:- Guided the security team in preparing for the AWS environment, setting up critical security frameworks such as AWS Control Tower, Service Control Policies (SCPs), and integrating Okta for secure identity management.
- Conducted training sessions for internal teams, focusing on AWS technologies and best practices, significantly enhancing internal AWS expertise.
- Managed complex network setups involving a central network account and Palo Alto firewalls, ensuring secure and robust connectivity within the cloud environment.
- Supervised external service providers to ensure the timely and correct delivery of AWS work packages, aligning with project goals and compliance requirements.
- Established automation patterns for the AWS environment using tools like Terraform, enabling the full automation of infrastructure deployments and achieving significant operational efficiency.
- Designed and introduced incident and change management processes for the AWS Landing Zone, standardising workflows and improving response times
- Developed standardised architecture patterns for serverless (e.g., AWS Lambda), containerised solutions (e.g., AWS ECS), and traditional EC2 instances, creating scalable and reusable solutions for future cloud projects.
- Implemented GitLab to enhance governance and support regulatory processes, including the establishment of best practices for version control and CI/CD pipelines, ensuring alignment with regulatory requirements.
- Led the analysis and migration of 1300 Windows-based systems, developing comprehensive technical analyses, migration strategies, and implementation roadmaps.
2022 - 2023: Ensuring agility in a regulated banking environment (14 Months)Role: Principal Cloud Architect
Customer: Sixt leasing
Tasks:Definition of Cloud Strategy, Cloud Architecture and Cloud Operating Model. Analysis and transformation of four Cloud and On-Prem infrastructure approaches into one AWS based, cloud native infrastructure. Extensive reorganising of company processes to meet technological approach. Refactoring of architecture patterns utilising AWS and industry best practices. Reinventing the software delivery pipeline. Establishing an API driven work culture with autonomous teams. Assisting businesses in shaping their technological and cultural strategies to align with their objectives, while ensuring adherence to secure processes in line with BSI and BAFIN standards.
Skills:AWS - Terraform - Terragrunt - Github Actions - Lambda - Glue - Athena - Docker - ECS - Cloudflare - K8s
2022 - 2023: Restarting a big brand from scratch (14 Months)Role: Principal Cloud Architec
Customer: custo erce
Tasks:As the AWS Principal Architect at Customerce, I led the strategic migration of the company's operations from Peter Hahn, a nascent tech venture, with the aim of rejuvenating their technological framework. My role centered on the deployment of an API and event-driven architecture, fully utilizing AWS cloud services for infrastructure optimization. I was instrumental in integrating Apache Kafka to enable real-time data streaming and event handling. Throughout this transition, I worked closely with diverse teams and the C-level, ensuring a smooth migration , all while upholding AWS best practices and stringent industry standards.
Skills:AWS - Terraform - Terragrunt - Github Actions - Lambda - Glue - Kafka - Docker - ECS - Cloudflare - K8s
2021 - 2021: Support, automate & scale cloud, on premise and foreign hosted datacenter operations (12 Months)
Role: Interims H.o. Cloud Infrastructure
Customer: CBR Fashion Group
Tasks:Leading a team of 6 DevOps Engineers with a goal to support, automate and scale cloud, on premise and foreign hosted datacenter operations. Constant reviews of agencies providing technology concepts, implementations or architecture designs on behalf of the client. Leading architecture workshops as cloud expert to represent the clients view and design architecture from a business driven point of view rather than on a bottom up strategy. Evaluation of migration paths from monolithic systems into API and microservice driven architecture considering technological, organisational, political and business driven aspects. Highlighting the importance of data collection and security issues that come along with it. Implementation of measures, which allow for a quick response in times of an attack or worldwide security risk scenarios (log4j, heartbleed,? ). Implementation of mechanisms, which automatically scale, patch, deploy setup and destroy infrastructure.
Skills:AWS - Terraform - Terragrunt - Gitlab - Github - Docker - ECS - OnPremise Datacenters - PHP - Kubernetes
2020 - 2020: Retailer wants to become an industry leader and modern marketplace (10 Months)Role: Principal Cloud Architect
Customer: Galeria Kaufhof Karstadt
Tasks:At Galeria Kaufhof Karstadt, I had the privilege of guiding a dedicated team to design an advanced PIM system, emphasizing an API-driven infrastructure using RESTful methods and AI-enhanced content optimization. Together, we leveraged the prowess of AWS services, incorporating DynamoDB for swift live data migration, Lambda for efficient processing with millions of concurrent executions, and API Gateway for secure and scalable interactions. Our system adeptly managed upward of 10 million article updates within short timeframes, ensuring prompt distribution to related systems via a pub/sub methodology. Throughout this venture, Terragrunt played a pivotal role in ensuring a refined infrastructure-ascode approach, streamlining version control, and enhancing our automation pipelines.
Skills:AWS - Terraform - Terragrunt - Lambda - Python - Cloudwatch - DynamoDB
2019 - 2019: Volkswagen goes cloud (8 Months)
Role: Principal Cloud Architect
Customer: Volkswagen Wolfsburg
Tasks:Lifting and shifting an enterprise like Volkswagen from on premise to AWS is a multiagency job. I was called to assist in the approach to make it work as one of many architects on the largest cloud project I?ve been. Being onsite in Wolfsburg my task was to take over the responsibility of all DNS traffic going from on prem to AWS and back. Furthermore I advised to get rid of serious flaws in the overall architectural and staging concept. Bringing applications to the cloud is not only a functional, but also cultural change, which I accompanied. The overall monitoring and logging approach was supervised by myself, the client and I decided on important metric to cover.
Skills:AWS - Terraform - DNS - Route53 - Route53 Resolver - Docker - Kubernetes - Kibana - Elastic - Logstash - Graphana
2020 - 2020: cloud concept and system archicture (4 Months)Role: Principal Cloud Architect
Customer: E3/DC Osnabrück
Tasks:E3/DC is operating in an emerging energy sector for storing and distributing energy on demand. In order to manage multiple data endpoints and ensuring automated communication with the energy grid to charge or discharge storage an on premise solution for data handling wasn't enough anymore. By collecting thousands of metrics a second it was necessary to move all snowflakes, which have been run and operated manually over the past years and transition the team and infrastructure alike to be able to face cloud lead automation. My responsibility was cloud concept and system archicture, as well as introducing new technologies like AWS aurora, Containers, automated CI/CD pipelines, autohealing and autoscaling. I've set a baseline with a concept for future projects and fast growing demand by enabling horizontal and vertical autoscaling mechanism.
Skills:AWS, CloudFormation, DNS, Route53, Route53 Resolver, IPsec, Docker, Kibana, Elastic, Logstash, Jenkins, Nginx, AWS Aurora, MySQL, NodeJS
2019 - 2019: digital business models covering leasing and factoring (6 Months)Role: Principal Cloud Architect
Customer: ABCFINLAB Cologne
Tasks:Starting on a green field abcfinlab is a reincarnated company so called enterprise startup, which develops digital business models covering leasing and factoring in a way the parent company would be unable to. In order to perform such a huge change AWS was a necessity. My role was to guide C-level in all technical
aspects besides chosen programming language. While establishing development workflows, selecting the technical toolchain consisting of Gitlab, Docker I was able to architect and engineer the base setup for their AWS approach. Over all the base setup uses AWS ECS to speed up and scale deployment, and application performance. The architecture allows to company to on global scale.
Skills:AWS, Elasticache, Docker, Lambda, Python, Java, Cloudformation, Gitlab, EC2, ECS, RDS, Route53, Docker
2019 - 2019: scripting configuration (4 Months)Role: Senior Cloud Architect
Customer: SCOPERTY/INTERHYP Munich
Tasks:Being a project of Interhyp ( Ing Group ) scoperty delivers a completely reimagined solution to sell and buy real estate. Joining the project, a proof of concept was already present describing the architecture in AWS by using cloudformation, which was generated by terraform and boto2 at the same time. Making it extremely difficult to handle, as everything relied on one script. My goal was to take what's given and ease it up, which was done by separating the scripting configuration in little pieces and resetting it up using only cloudformation.
Skills:AWS, Docker, Lambda, Python, React, Cloudformation, Terraform, Bamboo, EC2, ECS, RDS, Route53, Docker
2018 - 2018: conducting extensive infrastructure workshops (6 Months)Role: Senior Cloud Architect
Customer: ERGO Düsseldorf
Tasks:To guide Ergo employees undergoing a cloud transformation I supported the onsite team by conducting extensive infrastructure workshops regarding MongoDB, AWS and automation tools and Linux.
Skills:AWS, MongoDB, Puppet, RHEL, Windows
2018 - 2018: setup and automate infrastructure within Heroku and AWS (8 Months)Role: Senior Cloud Architect
Customer: APPICS San Francisco
Tasks:Appics is a Startup based in Switzerland and San Francisco, which is focused on building the next social platform for creators by utilising blockchain technology. My role was to setup and automate infrastructure within Heroku and AWS. By using Terraform it was possible to do this in a limited time frame, which allowed me to focus on blockchain and container technology itself and setup a selfhosted steemit ledger.
Skills:AWS, Dynamo, Mongo, RabbitMQ, Lambda, NodeJS, Terraform, Heroku, IAM, EC2, ECS, Route53, Cloudflare, Bash, Jenkins ( DSL ),Docker
2017 - 2017: supported the whole migration as part of the operations team (12 Months)Role: Senior Cloud Architect
Customer: ABOUTYOU Hamburg
Tasks:About You has the ambition to be one of the 5 big players in fashion across Europe. In order to do that they moved to AWS. I've supported the whole migration as part of the operations team, by shifting around 250 snowflake services and 500 servers to AWS. The whole migration has been done in a year and involved mainly strong communication, analysis of given infrastructure, migration to new technologies on the fly, eliminating snow flakes and technical depth. The project used 120 AWS accounts and huge variation of technologies.
Skills:AWS, Dynamo, Mongo, RDS, MySQL, VPC, IAM, EC2, Cloudformation, Route53, Python, Ansible, Packer, Bash, Jenkins ( DSL ), Heroku, NGINX, Apache, Akamai, Varnish, Docker, VPC, PHP
2017 - 2017: 10 MonthsRole: Senior Cloud Architect
Customer: MS WEITBLICK Munich
2016 - 2016: 12 MonthsRole: CTO
Customer: VEATO Munich
2016 - 2016: 3 MonthsRole: CTO
Customer: JIMMY FRESH Augsburg
2016 - 2016: 12 MonthRole: Scalability Engineer
Customer: OPTILE Munich
2015 - 2015: 6 Months
Role: Cloud Engineer
Customer: MIELE Munich
2015 - 2015: 6 MonthsRole: Cloud Engineer
Customer: Location: Munich
Further experience and project insights on request