About Me
Heiko Borchers
Clouds and Containers.
Over 10 Years of professional working experience.
I remember very fondly the times when I first started programming… Back when I was at around ten years old, making small programs in Delphi. But soon I realized, developing isn’t my strong suite. I much more preferred working with IT-Infrastructure. Servers, Switches, getting to know how everything worked together.
Building IT
After graduation from high school I started my military service (back when it still was mandatory in germany) and even there I worked in IT.
Automating software installation and basic system setup with OPSI and a large Windows domain, but I never really warmed to Windows Administration.
Later, during the time I tried to get a computer science degree, I worked for the Center for Economics and Neuroscience as developer and sysadmin.
A great time, programming in Ruby, Python and developing experiments in zTree while also being responsible for code I changed and deployed.
But during that time I realized, that a university degree was the wrong direction for me, so I started at a Trainee Program at the University of Düsseldorf to get my IHK Degree.
During that program I got introduced to ansible and IaC which became my passion.
Never again I wanted to do stuff manually or “non-reproducible”.
I created ansible roles and modules for rocket.chat, gitlab installations and updates.
My “Thesis” was about choosing the best CI/CD System for our use-case and implement it.
My choice was gitlab runners, since we already had a Gitlab up and running and gitlab runners were the most privacy-friendly option
enabling around 40.000 users to access CI/CD without much trouble.
Cloud Consultation
Soon after I got my IHK “degree”, I started working as cloud consultant.
In the beginning just building data transfer infrastructure for a german car manufacturer where I quickly made progress
learning about AWS and Terraform doing a “lift and shift” of legacy java software, I adapted my workflow and thought process to cloud environments.
With this “lift and shift” we had a very satisfied customers which got me assigned a new project.
Lead Developer
I was allowed to build a small team my team had a new mission.
We started on a clean slate.
A clean AWS VPC with the goal to have some SAP Cloud Infrastructure up and running in less than nine months.
My team, and I got to work immediately and after four weeks we came up with an MVP, that was barely cloud ready.
For cloud readiness (for instance the ability to survive instance redeployment) we had to change the whole SAP Linux configuration
But after a few challenges and hardships which we managed to solve thanks to other teams help we were able to satisfy our customer again.
DevOps Architect
After finishing this project the global pandemic (Covid-19) hit hard in Germany and I decided to change my employer, mostly because a 250 km commute (one direction) each day was a bad idea.
There I started working with kubernetes, openshift, azure and a lot of legacy infrastructure.
Implementing new tools for CI/CD, reproducible infrastructure builds, learning about kustomize
and building new tools like web enabled IDEs for remote pair programming was my day job. A very strict ISO 27001 and different views about
DevOps and what could be done and what’s reasonably made want to start my new adventure as