SRE at IONOS Cloud
Since January 2026 I’ve been a site reliability engineer at IONOS Cloud. My team is rebuilding the first layer of the datacenter, purely on Kubernetes, on bare metal, in every IONOS datacenter around the globe. It starts with DNS, so machines can find each other, and monitoring based on Prometheus, so we see what they’re doing.
On top of that, we’re migrating and building the platform services that internal services and developer teams run on: tenant Kubernetes clusters, monitoring and logging, Vault for secrets and encryption, PKI and deployment pipelines. All of it on Kubernetes, too.
It’s not quiet work, at least not for us. But when we do it well, nobody else notices. (And yes, it’s always DNS. These days it’s our DNS.)
Ten years at GapFish
In 2013 I joined GapFish, a young Berlin market research company running an online panel for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. I started as a software engineer writing Ruby. Over the years, millions of people signed up, and the panel grew to more than 500,000 active panelists, as ISO 20252 counts them.
In 2018 our team moved the whole platform, with three MongoDB clusters, three Redis clusters and two PostgreSQL databases, from managed hosting to Kubernetes, shipped by Deployer, the canary deployment tool we built in 2017, before Argo CD, Argo Rollouts or Flagger existed. Our team page called me a “Backend Developer, Kubernetes Enthusiast, Sailor”. Still accurate.
From 2019 I was CTO. We built an on-call team that brought recovery times down to seconds and applied every security patch within a day. In 2021 Cint bought GapFish. I stayed on as an SRE at Cint and led the senior on-call team that kept GapFish at 99.999% uptime for 50,000 daily users. Then we moved those users and customers onto the Cint platform.
Consulting at Nerdware
In 2024 and 2025 I consulted for Nerdware, first as a Kubernetes specialist, then as lead cloud engineer. For BMW, sharing Kubernetes nodes between workloads saved 18% of the resources, and pipelining the transfers made BMW’s worldwide software distribution four times faster.
We also built a vanilla on-premise Kubernetes cluster on Flatcar with immutable upgrades and closed every finding of an ISO 27001 audit, and I coached a team of four engineers.
My tmux plugin
I live in the terminal and I’m lazy with the mouse. When I couldn’t find an EasyMotion-style jump plugin for tmux, I wrote one: tmux-jump. Hit a key, type a character, and your cursor lands on it, anywhere on the screen.
Living in Emacs
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Most of my day happens in Emacs and a terminal. My dotfiles go back to 2013, zsh and tmux and an Emacs config built on Prelude, and I still tweak them.
On the water
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I sail skiffs and yachts. A skiff is fast, wet and honest: every mistake shows up immediately. A yacht is the long game, with weather, watches and a plan for when things go wrong.
Not so different from running production.
Old Harleys
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I ride a custom late Shovelhead from ’78 that I restored myself. It’s loud, it leaks a little, and you can understand every part of it with a wrench and a free afternoon.
I find that relaxing.
Family
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I’m married to my lovely wife, and together we have a daughter.
The best part of my day isn’t on any dashboard.
Log
- Site Reliability Engineer IONOS Cloud
- Lead Cloud Engineer Nerdware
- Kubernetes Specialist Nerdware
- Site Reliability Engineer Cint
- CTO GapFish
- Lead DevOps & Software Engineer GapFish
- Software Engineer GapFish
- B.Sc. Computer Science TU Berlin