with Adriaan Sterkenburg

From the air force to the cloud. Adriaan talks Azure, careers and public cloud workshops.

So Adriaan, what do you do around here?

I’m a public cloud engineer at True, responsible for the deployment and management of customer environments. I’ve been with the company for four years now – and in this role since June 2021. It’s great.

What’s been your most significant project recently?

Last year we developed a system that gives us a grip on the lifecycle management of Azure resources. Previously, Microsoft provided the information through a website, but this was too passive.

Our system scrapes notices from the Microsoft website, compares them to those previously added to the system’s database, notifies us when new notices are published, and compares new and existing notices with customer environments. It then lets us know if existing resources will be unsupported in the near future.

When did your career really take off?

It’s funny you mention ‘taking off’. Before True, I worked in air cargo logistics as a loadmaster – and before that I was in the air force. My career really got going five years ago when I quit my job and taught myself to code in Java. Realizing it came naturally to me, I felt confident enough to pursue a career in IT.

OK. So, from the air force to jetting off on holiday. Where’s your favorite destination?

Well, my wife is from the Philippines, so I’ll have an issue if I don’t say there! It’s a lovely country. The people are nice, the food is wonderful, and everything looks pretty.

Great choice. Right, back to the office, this year we’re increasing knowledge sharing within our Neighborhood. What can you teach people?

I’ve set up a workshop showing how public cloud resources can be used to create scalable environments. Our e-commerce customers are particularly interested in this – but everyone is welcome to join.

For example, resources can be set to auto scale based on metric values like CPU usage, memory usage or connection count. This means customers can set up a web application using minimal resources when traffic and usage is low. Then, when it increases, the environment will automatically scale horizontally without the need of engineers.

Great stuff. How can your neighbors get in touch?

If you want a chat or more info on the workshops, I’m available on Teams and at adriaan.sterkenburg@true.nl. You can also find me in the office in Amsterdam!