Past and Future

On this page I summarize my biggest projects of the past (as of January 2022) and my career plans for the future.

Past:

Introducing a CDN (Akamai) at wetteronline.de
- A CDN was a game changer for wetteronline.de. We faced a huge variety of user requests each day, while scalable and redundant infrastructure was far less common in the early 2000s. I brought Akamai and WetterOnline together and was responsible for configuring and maintaining the caching layer for many years, offloading up to 90% of requests from our data-center web servers.
Seventeen years on call with my team
- For 17 years, my team and I helped keep wetteronline.de—one of Germany’s highest-ranked IVW sites—online. Power outages and hardware or software problems occasionally caused downtime of a few hours, but never an entire day, and such incidents were rare. Today, cloud technology makes this level of resilience easier to achieve.
Leading the transition from bare metal to virtualization
- Years before WetterOnline began its cloud journey, we moved from multiple racks of bare-metal servers to VMware virtualization. This gave us greater flexibility and significantly reduced costs by eliminating unused hardware capacity.
Introducing monitoring to my company
- In 2007, I completed my second degree in computer science. As part of my practical thesis, I introduced Nagios at WetterOnline. Together with Zabbix, which I later introduced as well, it provided greater insight into server and application issues and performance.

Future plans as of January 2022:

Managing infrastructure as code with CloudFormation and the AWS Cloud Development Kit
Teaching cloud concepts to colleagues and clients
Containerizing server environments with ECS or EKS
Using CI/CD to simplify change management for infrastructure as code
Implementing event-driven solutions for monitoring and compliance with AWS Lambda and Step Functions
Becoming an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
Earning the AWS Certified Security – Specialty and AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional certifications