Ercan Ermis

I’m Ercan Ermis. Senior cloud platform engineer based in Breda, 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.

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.

Read this next

  • New to the writing here? Start on ercan.cloud for the recent technical posts.
  • Want to reach out? See Contact for LinkedIn, X, and GitHub.