Ercan Ermis

I’m Ercan Ermis. Senior cloud platform engineer based in the Netherlands. I have spent the last seven plus years building, migrating, and running the kind of AWS systems that are not allowed to fail: banking risk computation at BMW Bank, real-time mobile gaming infrastructure at Miniclip-acquisition scale, a 16-year-old on-prem betting platform lifted into AWS with zero downtime, and a live-streaming ingest pipeline that ran on a single set of hands.

I do not separate Platform Engineering, SRE, and DevOps into different jobs. I have held those three responsibilities in parallel at every role since 2017. Designing the target architecture, writing the IaC that provisions it, building the CI/CD that deploys onto it, and owning the reliability of the result in production. That stays the same across banks, gaming companies, startups, and hosting providers.

How I got here

The first computer in my life was an Amstrad with two 5.25-inch floppy drives, Floppy A and Floppy B, bought by my father in 1986 for his business. That was the introduction. The real love affair started in 1998, fourth grade, when my teacher installed Linux on one of the Windows 95 machines in our school computer lab and said “this is Linux, it is free software.” Then Pac-Man appeared on that black screen and I was done.

Why does this thing work. How does it actually work. What else can I make it do. How do I make it do that differently. More than thirty years later I am still asking those four questions and still at the keyboard. Hours in front of a computer have always been the place I feel most comfortable and most at peace. The job, the writing, and the consulting are all extensions of that.

What I optimize for

  • Reusable building blocks instead of one-off implementations. Every system gets a chance to become a module, a paved road, or a guardrail.
  • Security-by-design. Least-privilege IAM, KMS, network isolation, and policy enforcement are not late-stage additions.
  • End-to-end ownership. I do not throw infrastructure over a wall to “DevOps” and call it done.
  • Automation as a multiplier, not a flex. If a step is run twice, it is a candidate for code.

Where my writing lives

This site is the hub. The actual technical writing splits across two focused sub-sites so each one stays sharp:

  • ercan.cloud is where the cloud, AWS, EKS, Terraform, and platform engineering posts live. Hands-on field notes from production systems, written for engineers who already know what an IAM policy looks like.
  • ercan.ai is the home for AI, LLMs, agents, and applied machine learning writing. Building up; subscribe early.

Background and credentials

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Associate.
  • AWS Community Builder since 2022. Active in the Dutch AWS community.
  • Rotterdam chapter organizer for Claude Community NL. Follow the Rotterdam meetup at meetup.com/claude-rotterdam. First event is being scheduled. The Amsterdam chapter runs alongside, organized by Martijn van Dongen.
  • Founder of İzmir Yazılım Ağı, a local software community I grew from zero to 1,239 members and 57 events.
  • Linux since 1998. Long enough to remember what working without systemd actually felt like.

News and side projects

Selected platform project

UptimeCoach is my personal SaaS lab for global uptime monitoring. Deliberately provisioned across 20 AWS regions because the only honest way to test multi-region platform design is to actually run multi-region. I wound down the product side (solo founding is not how I want to spend my time) and kept it running as a reference architecture and a live test bed for new AWS primitives.

Consulting and advisory

I take on a small number of consulting engagements each year, and I genuinely enjoy that part of my work. The variety keeps my production instincts sharp, and the constraints of a real team and a real budget make the advice better than anything written in isolation.

How it can work:

  • Project-based. You have a migration, a platform redesign, or a cost problem you want solved. I come in, do the work alongside your team, and hand over the result.
  • Hourly advisory. You already have good engineers and want a second pair of eyes on architecture decisions, IAM design, Terraform module boundaries, or CI/CD shape. We talk when you need to.
  • Interim lead / transitional. Your platform team is between leads, growing fast, or picking up a critical project and needs someone who has done it before. I step in for a fixed stretch, set direction, and help hire or promote the permanent lead.

The topics I get pulled into most often: AWS cost optimization that goes deeper than “buy Savings Plans,” platform engineering strategy for teams hitting the 20-engineer inflection point, and EKS cluster architecture with actual least-privilege IAM from day one.

The full surface I consult on: AWS, cloud architecture, CI/CD pipelines, Linux, GitHub and GitLab tooling, Terraform and Terragrunt, Kubernetes and EKS, observability, cost optimization, migration, and the platform-engineering operating model that holds the rest together. If it lives in a production cloud account or a build pipeline, it is fair game.

If any of that sounds useful, reach me on LinkedIn. No pitch deck, no discovery form. A short message about what you are trying to solve and we take it from there.

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