OpenStack Experts in Germany

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

• Tasks and activities:

• Overall responsibility for designing, building, and implementing a company-wide cloud governance structure (Azure), including target picture, roadmap, and operating model.

• Managing internal and external stakeholders (C-level, IT, Security, Compliance, Cloud Architecture, DevOps), including decision and escalation management.

• Planning and facilitating workshops on cloud strategy, governance principles, and the design of areas such as identity, connectivity, and platform management.

• Defining, implementing, and rolling out cloud policies (Azure Policy / custom policies), security standards, and compliance requirements (including GDPR, ISO 27001, BSI C5).

• Building a cloud governance framework based on the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), including landing zone and guardrail concepts.

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

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

• Establishing and operationalizing FinOps in an enterprise environment (central and decentralized FinOps teams), including cost management strategies, reporting, and guardrails.

• Integrating 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).

• Implementing access concepts including RBAC design and breaking-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 use in a regulated environment.

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

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

• Significantly increased workload compliance during 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 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, breaking-glass concepts.

• ACME / certificate automation.

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

maturing their API Practices on both, a Business and Technology level. My role encompasses 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, nodejs, typescript, redocly, reactive programming, CDC, golang, gingonic, GitOps, DX (developer experience), stakeholder management, roadmaps, workshops, discovery.

As project manager for the Odoo implementation at a small company, I was responsible for designing, implementing, and training a fully integrated CRM and accounting system. Through structured requirements analysis, precise data migration, and targeted change management, I was able to complete the rollout in just eight weeks. The project led to a significant reduction in manual tasks, faster business processes, and increased real-time transparency.

Main Responsibilities

Requirements analysis and process mapping Configuration of Odoo modules: CRM, Sales, and Accounting Data migration (Excel/CSV → Odoo) and quality control Creation of workflows, automated email rules, and dashboards Conducting training sessions and providing support after go-live Project coordination (budget, schedule, stakeholder communication)

Key Achievements

Full implementation of the Odoo suite within the set timeframe (8 weeks) 30% reduction in accounting time and 25% acceleration of the lead-to-sale flow 100% customer satisfaction after go-live, based on survey results Successful migration of 100% of existing master data without data loss Establishment of a sustainable support infrastructure (3-month post go-live support)

Impact

Improved decision-making through real-time dashboards and automated reports Increased efficiency and cost savings (≈ €8,000/month) Scalability for future growth (additional modules can be integrated seamlessly) Strengthened sales and finance departments through seamless process integration

This summary highlights how I created concrete and measurable value for the company through structured project work, technical expertise, and targeted training.

• Development and introduction of operational processes
• Preparation of complete documentation packages (including emergency management and operations) to meet compliance requirements
• Introduction of a workshop on IaC (Infrastructure as Code)
• Professional consulting for the project's security concept (ISMS)
• Installation and operation of Kubernetes clusters on AWS, on-prem, and Azure
• Design of hybrid cloud architecture (on-prem, Hetzner, AWS)
• Analysis and resolution of incidents and system outages
• Network changes to firewall rules, gateways, OpenVPN settings, and IPsec tunnel (pfSense)
• Professional consulting on BitBucket, Jenkins, and GitLab CI/CD pipelines
• Consulting on Ansible deployments and infrastructure automation
• Consulting on building a scalable system in the cloud (AWS / Azure)
• Technologies / Tools: Ansible, Terraform, AWS, Azure, VPN, pfSense, Jenkins, Bitbucket, Kubernetes, GitLab Runner, ISMS, Golang, Prometheus, Grafana, S3, Lambda, RDS, ECS, Cognito, OIDC, Harbor, MinIO, Postgres, Redis, Keycloak, Ceph, Proxmox, CloudFormation, PostgreSQL, Flux CD, Hetzner, IONOS, Sonatype Nexus Repository, Entra ID, Dex IdP, Pulumi

• Adjusting, optimizing, configuring, and administering a multi-stage GitLab instance with over 250 users
• Building, adjusting, expanding, and optimizing infrastructure, configuration, and monitoring
• Providing services and handing them over to production
• System environment: DependencyTrack, GitLab, Grafana, Hedgedoc, Kubernetes, OAuth2 Proxy, Openstack, Prometheus, Syseleven

Predapp is a Sovereign AI and Infrastructure company building AI systems that organisations can own, control, and deploy on their terms, with full data sovereignty. As CTO and investor since 2015, leading the development of the Sovereign AI Platform alongside an advisory practice spanning AI strategy for enterprises, fractional CTO engagements, and technical due diligence for VCs, PE, and family offices.

• Architected the Sovereign AI Platform from zero owning technical vision, infrastructure design, and engineering roadmap; currently deployed at a European hospital, an automotive client in Germany, and two US startups, with active commercial discussions with two leading European hosting providers
• Dubai Health Authority (DHA / Nabidh): Designed and trained AI symptom checker and triage system for national 'Doctor for Every Citizen' initiative under HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
• Emirates Airlines: Designed and deployed AI agent for ground personnel accelerating training, improving issue handling, and reducing cost of liquid workforce
• Developed explainable AI triage system piloted at University Hospital Heidelberg and Famagusta Hospital (Cyprus); reduced patient wait times by up to 15% (validation ongoing)
• Built production scheduling engine for US industrial AI startup: RL + Monte Carlo tree search, reducing planning from hours to seconds
• Designed and led the development of semantic search engines using RAG + Knowledge Graphs; developed Agentic Text-to-SQL solution for citizen data scientists
• AI strategy advisory and readiness assessments for enterprise clients, including architecture reviews, maturity assessments, and AI roadmap development

• Identification of requirements (legal, organizational, and technical)
• Design of solution architectures
• Evaluation of concepts and technologies
• Preparation of decision templates
• Architectural Decision Records (ADR)
• Coordination of implementation
• Review of implementations
• Documentation

• Implementation of specified DevOps solutions to automate infrastructure (Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, Ansible) on-premises datacenter (Ovirt, Proxmox, Ceph Cluster, MinIO) and private cloud.
• Administration, configuration and implementation of CI/CD DevOps pipelines (GitLab, GitFlow) to support development process (Artifactory, Prometheus, Istio, service mesh, Helm Chart, OpenShift (Red Hat Enterprise) / Kubernetes cluster), Red Hat Satellite.
• Administration, setup, monitoring and patching of Linux infrastructure based on Red Hat Enterprise for Dev, Test and QA.
• Use of Scrum and Kanban methods.
• Administration, configuration and implementation of security standards for deploying on Dev, Test, QA and Prod stages of the new ePA applications.
• Development of new plugins and add-ons needed on current infrastructure.
• Database support.
• Data analytics support (Python, Spark, Pandas, Power BI, Splunk Enterprise).
• Implementation of best practices for DevSecOps and BizDevOps using GitOps (ArgoCD), Streamlit framework, Semaphore Ansible UI.
• Configuration and testing of iperf, uperf, sysbench using benchmark-operator for external source data and IoT/MDM devices, creating reports via ELK / OpenSearch.
• Building a new Databricks platform to collect and analyze big data from different sources and IoT devices into Hadoop framework (Python, Pandas, PySpark, Power BI, Apache Airflow).
• Building backend data aggregation and processing to automate configuration deployment between different OpenShift clusters and big data framework (Python, Pandas, PySpark, Apache Spark, PostgreSQL, Django 2, Ansible Automation, Jira JSM).
• Building a new ML pipeline platform using Kubeflow, TensorFlow, KServe.
• Data extraction, transformation and loading from different data sources including structured and unstructured data to analytic DWH / big data cluster using Python, Pandas, Polars, Power BI, Django backend and PostgreSQL.
• Setup of new DevOps Test and QA HashiCorp Vault cluster for PKI and IAM.
• Configuration and testing of automated patching based on CVSS score, SIEM-integrated CVEs.
• Use of Nexpose and InsightVM to scan vulnerability events in network, host, container and application.
• Design and implementation of secure and scalable AWS architectures including VPC, EC2, S3, RDS and Route53 and similar setups on Azure and GCP.
• Automated system provisioning and deployment using CloudFormation templates.
• Configuration of IAM roles, policies and permissions to ensure secure access control.
• Patch management, backup automation and disaster recovery setup on AWS infrastructure.
• Monitoring and optimization of system performance using AWS CloudWatch and AWS Trusted Advisor.
• Support of VMware services (vSphere, Aria, Horizon) and the virtual desktop environment.
• Development and maintenance of CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD and AWS CodePipeline with interface to Nutanix.
• Configuration of AWS CloudWatch to monitor application performance and system events.
• Planning and execution of migration of on-premises applications to AWS cloud platforms.
• Deployment of containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes in AWS environments.
• Deployment of internal software packages between availability zones using AWS CodeDeploy.
• Building and deploying ML models using Scikit-learn, XGBoost and Spark MLlib including hyperparameter tuning, model evaluation and production deployment.

• Analysis of technical and economic feasibility
• Creation of a detailed project plan including time and resource management
• Requesting and evaluating offers, selecting components, and managing suppliers
• Coordination of all involved trades (e.g. electricians, installation companies)
• Monitoring the construction work and ensuring deadlines, budgets, and quality standards are met
• Acceptance and commissioning of the PV system including documentation
• After project completion: optimizing monitoring and supporting grid connection

• Managing complex infrastructure initiatives (digital transformation, cloud migration from OpenStack to MS Azure, BSI C5 compliance) including cost control and optimization across multiple business units.
• Leading a strategic cloud transformation project for an end customer to ensure scalability, compliance, and business impact, including budget, schedule, and scope planning.
• Leading interdisciplinary teams in operational and project environments to deliver innovative, scalable, and secure IT infrastructures.
• Implementing agile processes and ceremonies to foster innovation, continuous improvement, and increase adaptability within the IT organization.
• Strategically planning and managing resources, budgets, and milestones, while actively communicating with clients and stakeholders.

• Conducting cybersecurity readiness checks based on an in-house assessment methodology
• Analyzing the external attack surface using the Graydaxe EASM platform
• Assessing maturity levels and deriving prioritized recommendations for action

• Owning RAG, LLM-System, ML-ops-Pipelines for various startups in Insurance, Banking, Energy (KRITIS)

• Implementation of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform to ensure a scalable, repeatable, and secure Azure infrastructure
• Implementation and optimization of CI/CD pipelines with Azure DevOps
• Management of container and server environments and AKS

• System design for problem solving and task allocation for demand infrastructures using modern enterprise solutions and SDLC principles
• SaaS and PaaS development, problem solving, and cloud computing
• Infrastructure-as-code implementations for development, Q&A, and production environments
• Terraform, AWS, Azure, GCP, MongoDB, OpenStack, Cisco, OpenShift