Intro

Hello, I’m Joost,

This site is a way for me to share the knowledge I build up in more then 30 years of passionate creative development. During this time I’ve touched many aspects of software development and automation. The journey started when I was 13 years old together with a friend. At that time everything was new and we just had to try and fail and try and fail again until we had the best we could think of.

But thats long ago, lets start with today.

Cloud specialist

Cloud is great! I’m mostly specialized in AWS but I’m rapidly learning the quirks of azure as well. When you would ask me what the best and worst services are of the clouds you probably get a different answer then anyone else you would ask. My answer would be:

	AWS	Azure
Best	Cloudformation with CDK	ARM with bicep
Worst	EC2	Azure virtual machines

Worst services

Lets start with the worst services. Indeed its all about virtual machines. My opinion is that these are:

• Expensive
• Black boxes (what is in /opt /var /etc)
• Easy to forget
• Difficult to scale
• Needs patching
• Needs functional management (call me lazy but I don’t wish to be on call 24/7)
• This was nice 10 years ago

Often when I talk to people the real answer for using a virtual machine is “But this is what I know”.

Needless to say, my preferred way being in the cloud is full serverless.

Best services

The common denominator for best services are the cloud orchestration services. Clicking around a cloud portal is nice for trying out new stuff but the real power comes with duplication and reproducibility. The orchestration services are making this possible.

Also with bicep and CDK you can easily construct your full blown serverless applications with dozens of functions with a clear security context.