Apache Tomcat Experts in Germany

AI Readiness - Part 3: Creating an e-book on the use of AI in software testing

• Designed and created an e-book on the sensible and safe use of AI in software testing from the perspective of an experienced test expert.
• Used generative AI (ChatGPT, Perplexity Pro) as a sparring partner for structuring, wording suggestions and creating variations, with all content finally reviewed and approved using my own expertise.
• Developed practical insights into the opportunities and risks of AI in testing, with a special focus on collaboration between testers and AI instead of “tester vs. AI”.
• Title: “11 starke Gründe: Dream-Team statt Rivalen - Tester und KI sind gemeinsam unschlagbar”
• Subtitle: “Wie Mensch und Maschine im Softwaretest das perfekte Team bilden – und warum reines KI-Testing riskant ist.”
• Planned use of the e-book as a basis for workshops, customer meetings or internal training.
• Technology: Generative AI, ChatGPT, Perplexity Pro, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, many years of hands-on professional testing experience, common sense.

• Analysis of existing microservice structures and integration into the event-driven architecture
• Design and implementation of prototypes
• Introduction of structured workflows and integration into a solid testing strategy
• Team: Small specialized team (3-5 people) from analysis through implementation readiness
• Documentation of architectural decisions and definition of interfaces
• Integration of the event-driven pipeline into the existing landscape
• Technologies: Kafka, Docker, Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture, Java, Liquibase

• Industry: Insurance, Trade, IT
• Customers & Projects: Consulting and selling insurance and similar services
• Main tasks: Insurance consulting (health insurance, retirement planning, wealth building); commercial services, inside and field sales; sales data analysis and forecasting; customer consulting and support; opening a new sales headquarters for private and business customers; business development & innovation management; business use case development; process optimization; stakeholder management; team leadership and training; preparation and delivery of trainings;
• Technologies used: Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Draw.IO, Camunda 8, Java (8, 17,21,25), Git, Spring Boot, Spring Batch, Spring Data REST, Spring Web, Spring Security, J-Unit, Playwright, Lombock, Vaadin, H2, PostgreSQL (16, 17 18), pgAdmin, Docker, LLMs, JasperSoft Studio, JasperReports

• Development of an agent-based governance platform for the automated assurance of EU AI Act compliance and ODA-compliant orchestration of AI services in complex enterprise environments.

• Design and implementation of an agent-based "Mission Control" framework (Aletheia Conductor) for autonomous state monitoring and process control.

• Development of "Compliance-as-Code" (CaC) solutions based on OPA/Rego for system-wide enforcement of regulatory guardrails.

• Integration of TM Forum ODA standards (TMF630, TMF622, TMF642) to ensure interoperability and standardization.

• Building a highly available event-driven architecture using Redpanda and CloudEvents v1.0 for near-real-time event processing.

• Implementation of an audit-proof "Evidence Chain" through cryptographic linking of trace logs in preparation for automated audits.

• Tech Stack: Java 21 (Quarkus Native), TypeScript (Next.js), Redpanda (Kafka API), CloudEvents v1.0, OPA (Open Policy Agent) & Rego, TimescaleDB, ZincSearch, Redis, TM Forum ODA, Git, GitHub, Clean Code Development, Like-C4.

Maturing their API practices on both a business and technology level. My role covers strategy, architecture, developer advocacy as well as hands-on software engineering, enabling both technical teams and business leadership to adopt and act on API-centric principles effectively. Coincidentally, we also establish GitOps, DX and platform best practices with this project.

Highlights:

• Aligning executives with the initiative by clarifying strategy, replacing misconceptions and myths with facts, clarifying the value of existing assets and enabling informed decision-making
• Formulating a way forward for API Lifecycle Management at OTTO
• Driving platform progress and fostering developer engagement by hands-on engineering work towards strategic goals

API Lifecycle Management, Team Topologies, Organizational Evolution, Regulatory, Platform Advocate, Developer Platform, Communities of Practice, Terraform, Kotlin, Kafka, Kong, WSO2, Apigee, Gravitee, Backstage, AsyncAPI, OpenAPI, API Design, AWS, React, Node.js, TypeScript, Redocly, reactive programming, CDC, Golang, Gin, GitOps, DX (developer experience), stakeholder management, roadmaps, workshops, discovery.

Built an international e-commerce platform for a multi-vendor marketplace for digital assets from scratch. Designed and operated cloud native architectures at enterprise scale.

• Designed and operated a highly scalable microservice and serverless architecture
• Built the complete cloud infrastructure with Terraform + AWS CDK in AWS
• Provisioned ECS/EKS clusters (Fargate), Application Load Balancers (reverse proxy), and Lambda functions
• Observability & tracing with CloudWatch, DataDog, Prometheus, and Grafana
• End-to-end setup with DataDog (formerly AWS CloudWatch), Prometheus, and custom Grafana dashboards
• Integration of advanced metrics (including ORM mapper) and distributed tracing with Jaeger
• Robust backup and disaster recovery strategies
• RDS Postgres backups and hourly snapshots
• Read-only, asynchronously synchronized replicas with automated master failover in emergencies
• Minute-level rollback capability through versioned Docker images on ECS and Git-based CI/CD pipelines
• Created CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions for automated multi-stage deployments (Dev, Testing, Prod)
• Integrated Stripe for international payment processing
• Built a marketplace payment system with multiple parties and payout routines
• Used Algolia for high-performance real-time search of digital assets on the platform
• Federation of services with GraphQL and Hasura
• Later migration to GraphQL Mesh
• Test Driven Development (TDD) - unit, integration, and E2E testing with Jest, Vitest, and Playwright
• Used Next.js / React for modern frontend applications in the nx monorepo
• Enterprise security architecture & access control
• Integration of JWT tokens with Auth0, OAuth, OIDC, IP guards, BOLA protection, and secret vaults
• Authorization concepts with RBAC, ABAC, and native Postgres Row-Level Security (RLS)
• Built internal microfrontends with Retool for fast prototyping and operational business processes

Technologies: ABAC, AWS CDK, AWS CloudWatch, AWS ECS, AWS EKS, AWS Fargate, AWS RDS, AWS S3, Algolia, Auth0, DataDog, Docker, GitHub Actions, Grafana, GraphQL, GraphQL Mesh, Hasura, JWT, Jaeger, Java, JavaScript, Jest, Kotlin, Kubernetes, Monorepo, Next.js, OIDC, Playwright, Postgres, Postgres RLS, Prometheus, RBAC, Redis, Retool, Serverless, Stripe, Terraform, TypeScript, Vitest

• Integration of highly regulated countries such as China and South Korea into a company-wide M365 tenant.

• Technical contact for integrating special requirements for the executive board and German subsidiaries that are subject to BaFin compliance requirements.

• Subproject management.

• Coordination of requirements within the overall architecture.

• Design of the use of DLP features from Microsoft Purview.

• Design of special access restrictions via Entra ID Conditional Access.

• Support in designing the provisioning of Teams teams and SharePoint sites with higher compliance requirements.

• Technical support for implementing information classification with sensitivity labels for SharePoint Online and Teams.

• Technical support for the subproject introducing CoPilot for M365.

• Skills: M365, Purview, DLP, Entra ID, Sensitivity Labels, CoPilot, Teams, SharePoint Online.

• Modernization of a large-scale Java enterprise application*

The project is modernizing a complex enterprise application that has grown over many years. The existing Spring-based legacy system runs on Java 8, OSGi, and Eclipse RCP and is being gradually migrated to a modern, maintainable architecture with Java 25 and Quarkus.

Marcus works on analysis, architecture, refactoring, and implementation. One focus is on untangling historically grown structures and dependencies and on building a clean, sustainable Java and Quarkus technology stack.

Tools & technologies: Java 8, Java 25, Quarkus, Hibernate ORM with Panache, EclipseLink, OSGi, Eclipse RCP, Maven, JUnit, Mockito, REST, JSON, Git, Eclipse IDE, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, Jira, Confluence

• Introduction of 5 different process applications for different teams

• Release planning: scope and time management

• Resource/capacity planning

• Conducting Sprint Planning / retrospectives

• Increment planning (several sprints)

• Preparation of Steering Committee meetings / reporting to the Board

• Coordination / alignment with external suppliers / deliveries

• Resource planning for multiple projects

• Coordination with business department and development team

• Identification of best practices with IBM BAW

• Cost control and planning for the project team and external service providers

• Collection of KPIs using LogScale

• Analysis of application errors with LogScale / Queries

• User Story definitions / coordination of requirements with the business department and development team

• Testing and defect tracking

• UI/UX design of applications

• Preparation and moderation of Brown-Paper workshops

• Test concept, test data, test organization, test execution

• Collection of team velocity / metrics

• Test execution

• Script for automated testing

• Test organization with business department and IT

• Recording and prioritization of defects

• Establishment and operation of the application

• Establishment of application monitoring with LogScale Dashboards

• Checking health endpoints with PowerShell

• Post Mortem analysis

• Establishment of Incident Management

• Establishment of Problem Management

• Analysis of errors using LogScale Queries and Dashboard

• Pre-processing of data for AI

• Evaluation using AI language models (Meta Llama 3.3 LLM and deepset Haystack) and RAG

• Installation of runtime environments for LLMs (Large Language Model)

• Evaluation of various LLMs

• Installation of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) and integration with LLM

• Extraction of unstructured data with LLM and RAG

• Project based on IBM BAW (Business Automation Workflow), Websphere Liberty, Domea, d.3, REST, LogScale (formerly Humio), Swagger, Powershell, JIRA, Confluence, Lucom Interaction Platform (LIP), Mattermost, Jabber

• Building a data integration platform for high, medium, and low voltage assets for contextual analysis of time series with master data from the SCADA control system (IEC 60870 104), INIS, and SAP.
• Responsibility for the architecture and implementation of the solution, as well as sparring partner for the Product Owner.
• Use of Kotlin, Spring Boot, Maven, TimescaleDB, PostgreSQL, liquibase, Elements IoT, Docker, Kubernetes, Grafana, Python, jupyter, and various API gateways.

• Ride-sharing and bus platform, live and fully functional. Backend with Spring Boot 4.1 on Java 21, PostgreSQL with Flyway, and Testcontainers integration tests. Hosted in my own AWS account (ECS Fargate, ALB, ECR, IAM Least-Privilege) with CI/CD via GitHub Actions and OIDC federation without static credentials. Development fully AI-supported with Claude Code, including custom skills and project-specific memory. Spring Boot · Java 21 · PostgreSQL · Flyway · Docker · AWS ECS/ALB/ECR · CI/CD · GitHub Actions · Claude Code

Conducting a GAP analysis to assess existing security measures → identifying critical vulnerabilities

Developing an action plan that takes risk and cost-effectiveness into account

Introducing an IT maturity model based on BSI guidelines

Advising management on compliance, governance, and security strategy

Establishing internal processes for a sustainable security organization

• Short description: Lead a group-wide project to establish standardized cloud governance for Microsoft Azure, including policies, security and compliance controls, automation, and cost and operations control while preserving the autonomy of decentralized business units within regulatory boundaries.

• Tasks and activities:

• Overall responsibility for the design, setup, and implementation of an enterprise-wide cloud governance structure (Azure), incl. target picture, roadmap, and operating model.

• Management of internal and external stakeholders (C-level, IT, Security, Compliance, Cloud Architecture, DevOps) incl. decision-making and escalation management.

• Planning and facilitation of workshops on cloud strategy, governance principles, and the design of areas such as Identity, Connectivity, and Platform Management.

• Definition, implementation, and rollout of cloud policies (Azure Policy / custom policies), security standards, and compliance requirements (including GDPR, ISO 27001, BSI C5).

• Building a cloud governance framework aligned with the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), incl. landing zone and guardrail concepts.

• Introduction of automation solutions for governance, security, and cost control (policy/control automation, IaC, CI/CD-based control mechanisms).

• Implementation of cloud security and compliance monitoring mechanisms as well as continuous improvement processes.

• Establishment and operationalization of FinOps in an enterprise environment (central and decentralized FinOps teams), incl. cost management strategies, reporting, and guardrails.

• Integration of governance policies into DevOps processes (e.g. CI/CD principles for security and compliance checks, GitLab Runner concept in spokes, GitLab CI/CD for CAF landing zones).

• Implementation of access concepts incl. RBAC design and "break glass" mechanisms (emergency access) as well as certificate automation (ACME / step-ca).

• Achievements:

• Created a unified, auditable governance and control set for Azure (policies, standards, compliance mapping) and thus laid the foundation for scalable cloud usage in a regulated environment.

• Established repeatable automation for governance, security, and cost control (IaC + CI/CD), reducing manual effort and implementation risks.

• Improved operational and decision-making capabilities across central and decentralized units (clearer roles, responsibilities, escalation paths, balance between autonomy and group requirements).

• Significantly increased workload compliance for lift-and-shift migrations.

• Technologies used:

• Microsoft Azure Policy, custom policies.

• Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt.

• step-ca (ACME).

• Entra ID.

• Azure Firewall.

• Azure networking, hub-and-spoke architecture.

• Azure vWAN (evaluation).

• Azure Front Door, Azure Application Gateway.

• Azure ExpressRoute.

• Azure Key Vault.

• NetBox.

• GitLab (on-premises).

• Infrastructure, concepts used:

• Cloud shared responsibility model.

• Hub-and-spoke connectivity / central shared services (from a hub-spoke context).

• Central governance with decentralized delivery (business unit autonomy with guardrails).

• Methods used:

• Scrum.

• Stakeholder management (C-level to engineering).

• Cloud governance, Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF).

• DevOps, CI/CD.

• Cost and FinOps approaches: tagging/chargeback models, budget/alert concepts, reserved instances/savings plans vs. on-demand scenarios, sensitivity analyses.

• RBAC, "break glass" concepts.

• ACME / certificate automation.

• GitLab Runner concept in spokes, GitLab CI/CD pipelines for CAF landing zones.

Unified ITSM framework

• Definition of a company-wide ITSM target picture
• Introduction of a uniform service structure across all business units

SLA and OLA management

• Building a standardized SLA framework
• Definition of service classes (Business Critical, Standard, Low Priority)
• Introduction of OLAs between internal teams
• Building meaningful SLA reporting
• Definition of KPI and service dashboards for business units

Service portfolio management

• Definition of service descriptions
• If needed, preparing possible cost and service billing

Ticketing & processes

• Incident management
• Uniform ticket categories
• Standardized prioritization
• Escalation matrix
• Automations
• Self-service optimization

Request fulfillment

• Service catalog across all business units
• Approval workflows

Problem management

• Introduction of root cause analysis
• Known error database
• Problem review process

Complete asset management concept

• Hardware lifecycle management
• Software lifecycle management
• Leasing lifecycle
• Mobile device lifecycle
• Monitor lifecycle
• Phone lifecycle

Processes

• Procurement
• Goods receipt
• Inventory
• Assignment
• Return
• Disposal
• Leasing return Goal: single source of truth for all assets

CMDB design

• Definition of all configuration items:
• Workplace
• Notebooks
• Monitors
• Mobile phones
• Printers

Infrastructure

• Servers
• Firewalls
• Switches
• WLAN
• Storage
• Backup systems

Cloud

• Azure resources
• Microsoft 365
• SaaS services

Relationships

• User ↔ Asset
• Asset ↔ Service
• Service ↔ Infrastructure
• Location ↔ Asset
• Goal: make all service dependencies visible

Software asset & license management

• License management concept
• License balancing
• Compliance reporting
• Microsoft license management
• Adobe license management
• SaaS management
• Contract management
• Renewal management

Interfaces & automation Existing systems

• Workday
• Joiner
• Mover
• Leaver

TESMA

• Leasing data
• Contract data

Matrix42

• Asset synchronization
• User synchronization

Active Directory / Entra ID

• User management

Microsoft 365

• License assignment
• Group management

Dormakaba

• Access processes

• Lifecycle services

Monitoring platforms

• PRTG
• Palo Alto
• Cisco

Reporting & KPI framework

• Definition of a management dashboard
• KPIs
• Ticket volume
• SLA fulfillment
• MTTR
• First resolution rate
• Asset accuracy
• License compliance
• Change success rate
• Service availability
• Degree of automation

Network redesign support

• Governance
• Support of the network redesign from an ITSM point of view
• Definition of affected services
• Change management structure
• Communication concept

CMDB integration

• Recording of all network components
• Service mapping
• Dependency analysis

Validation of documentation and knowledge base articles

• Network documentation
• Operations documentation
• Standard changes

Monitoring & event management

• Target picture
• Central monitoring concept
• Event management process
• Alerting strategy
• Escalation model

Systems

• Cisco

• Palo Alto

• Fortinet

• Rubrik

• Veeam

• Matrix42

• Azure

• Microsoft 365 Automation

• Ticket creation from monitoring

• Escalations

• Standard actions

Audit, compliance & information security

• ISO 27001 consulting
• TISAX consulting
• NIS2 preparation - consulting
• Audit-ready processes
• Documentation structure
• Evidence tracking in Matrix42

Roadmap

• 12-month roadmap
• Prioritization of all measures
• Quick wins
• Medium-term projects
• Long-term target picture
• Documentation