Edwin de Jong · Lead DevOps Engineer

# about

Infrastructure, from the inside out.

I'm a Lead DevOps Engineer at Kongsberg Discovery, where I modernize CI/CD and Azure platform infrastructure, and coach engineers on working with AI tools.

Before that I worked on infrastructure at Nord Pool, one of Europe's power exchanges, and was the only technical lead on an event platform at Tappin.

Outside of work I've spent more than ten years building Ugaris, an MMORPG I played as a kid. In 2026 I added Ons Klaverjas, a Dutch card game for the whole family. Both run on my homelab.

It all started with a forum in high school. Then came voice servers for gaming clans, and a ladder system I had to learn to code for. I build things because I need them, and I like knowing how stuff works all the way down. Whether that’s a branch policy in Azure DevOps or a C struct from 2002 that someone memcpy’d into a database.

Cloud & Infrastructure

Azure
AKS
Kubernetes
Talos Linux
Proxmox VE
ZFS
Cloudflare
AWS

Infrastructure as Code

Terraform
Ansible
Sealed Secrets
Helm

CI/CD & GitOps

Azure Pipelines
GitHub Actions
ArgoCD
Docker

Observability

Prometheus
Grafana
Loki
Alertmanager
Azure Monitor

Networking & Security

VLAN design
Cilium
MetalLB
Traefik
VPN
PKI / TLS
CIS hardening

Languages

C / C++
Rust
Go
Kotlin
Python
TypeScript
GDScript
PHP
SQL
Bash

Data

MariaDB / MySQL
ProxySQL
Flyway
PostgreSQL
Valkey
Kafka

Ways of working

AI-assisted engineering
On-call & incident response
Mentoring
Vendor management

# experience

Where I've worked.

Platform and DevOps work in Norway, at companies where downtime gets expensive quickly.

Lead DevOps Engineer
Kongsberg Discovery
Apr 2025 → Present1 yr 7 mo · Horten, Norway · Hybrid
Leading CI/CD and Azure platform work for a maritime technology company, and coaching engineers on AI-assisted development.
Highlights6
- Modernizing CI/CD across Azure DevOps and writing the reference pipeline definitions other teams now build, test and deploy from.
- Leading large Azure infrastructure migrations with minimal disruption to production.
- Running Azure DevOps governance: branch policies, service connections, variable groups and repository conventions.
- Writing Terraform and Ansible for Azure, so provisioning across landing zones and subscriptions is reproducible and auditable.
- Designing the platform on AKS, Azure Container Registry and Azure Monitor.
- Coaching engineers on using LLMs day to day, including GitHub Copilot, OpenCode and AGENTS.md-driven workflows.
- Azure
- Azure DevOps
- AKS
- Terraform
- Ansible
- Azure Monitor
- ACR
- Prometheus
- Grafana
DevOps Engineer
Nord Pool
Oct 2022 → Mar 20252 yrs 6 mo · Oslo, Norway · Hybrid
Infrastructure for one of Europe's biggest power exchanges, where the trading platform can't go down.
Highlights6
- Led a migration of infrastructure between Azure Intune environments with minimal downtime.
- Wrote and maintained the Terraform for Azure, replacing manual provisioning.
- Built hardened CIS images with Ansible as part of the Azure security baseline.
- Helped design Landing Zones to strengthen security and compliance.
- Negotiated vendor contracts that cut costs significantly without lowering service quality.
- Took part in the 24/7 on-call rotation for incident response.
- Azure
- Terraform
- Ansible
- Kubernetes
- ArgoCD
- Kafka
- GitHub Actions
- Cloudflare
- Prometheus
- Grafana
Senior Software Engineer → Technical Lead
Tappin
May 2019 → Oct 20223 yrs 6 mo · Oslo, Norway
Joined as a senior engineer and became the sole technical lead of a high-traffic online event platform.
Highlights5
- Took over all technical operations as the company's only technical lead.
- Led the rewrite of an outdated PHP version, improving both performance and security.
- Designed, built and ran the high-traffic event platform, including live chat, voting and speaker management.
- Hired, trained and mentored a new technical team.
- Kept a large legacy application running while modernizing its key components.
- PHP
- Laravel
- AWS
- Kubernetes
- MySQL

Full CV

# side-quest/ugaris

Ugaris, the game I couldn't let go.

Ugaris: The Legend Recovered

Live · Steam release coming soon

Ugaris is the game I played as a kid and the place I met my wife. In 2014 Daniel Brockhaus open-sourced Mercenaries of Astonia, and I grabbed the code the day it went public.

At first I just wanted to see if I could get it to compile. Twelve years later it's a free-to-play isometric MMORPG with a small group of loyal players who log in every day, and it has a Steam page.

Lead Developer & Project Lead

Play free Wishlist on Steam

1,300+
Registered accounts: since 2014
Years in production: dev · ppe · prod
Environments: ~100
Discord members

$ ls ~/ugaris

Game serverCThe original core, still running. Each area runs as its own container.
ClientGodotRebuilt interface, zoom and lighting, minimap and world map, voiced NPCs. Replaced the SDL client and the Electron launcher.
GatewayRustKeeps one player connection open and routes logins and area transfers between server instances.
Chat serverC++Real-time chat, bridged to Discord.
APIRustAccounts, characters, clans, leaderboards and the shop. Replaced an earlier Go version.
WebsiteSvelteKitReplacing the old PHP site, after a first attempt in Astro.
Discord botPythonTwo-way chat sync between Discord and the game.
DataMariaDB · FlywayA three-node replicated cluster behind ProxySQL. Every schema change is a Flyway migration.
BusValkeyChat, clan notices, heartbeats and other messages between the game areas.
ResourcesPythonEvery sprite, sound and font catalogued in one repo and packed into release builds.
DistributionGitHub Actions · SteamNew builds go straight to an internal test branch on Steam, and get promoted to the public after approval.

$ git log

v0.1
Fork
Mercenaries of Astonia goes open source. Forked it, got it compiling, and ran it on a Hetzner server way too big for it.
v0.2
Accounts
The first sign-up page: PHP calling C executables. It worked. Nobody should look at it.
v1
Community site
Player profiles, high scores, clans and spawn timers. The point where old friends started finding each other again.
v2
BLOB migration
Every raw memory dump of quest, NPC and character data became proper tables. It took months and it was scary.
v3
Data layer
Connection pooling, then ProxySQL. The database stopped being a single fragile connection.
v4
Containers
Moved from bare metal to Docker, with each game area in its own container and full CI/CD.
v5
Real environments
Moved to Ansible-managed VMs on an isolated network, with separate dev, pre-production and production environments and a replicated database cluster.
v6
Web rewrite
A Go API and an Astro site first, then rewritten again as a Rust API with a SvelteKit frontend.
v7
Godot client
One Godot client replaces the old SDL client and the Electron launcher. Steam sign-in, a rendered minimap and world map, and voiced NPCs.
v8
Pipeline
A Rust gateway in front of the servers, Flyway migrations, a catalogued resource repo, and automated Steam builds.
next
Steam & content
The public Steam release, crafting and resource gathering, and lots of new areas and quests. Levels 130 to 150 are already being tested.

The BLOB migration is still the thing I’m most proud of. The original server saved quest, NPC and character data as raw memory dumps. Turning all of that into proper tables, one reversible migration at a time without losing any player data, took months.

Read the full story

# homelab

A data center in my house.

It started with a forum I hosted in high school. Then came voice servers for gaming clans, a Hetzner server running up to twenty sites, a laptop that overheated during a gaming event, a Raspberry Pi, and a couple of second-hand desktops from Finn.no. Today it's a full rack in Vestfold.

120+
CPU threads: 224+ GB
RAM: ~100 TB
Storage: 6
Talos nodes: 120+
Pods: 40+
ArgoCD apps

proxmox cluster · 4 nodesvestfold, no

tully

“Family, Duty, Honor”

Smart home

Home Assistant, NVR with object detection, Zigbee, MQTT, automations, a mail gateway, Nextcloud, and a third of the Kubernetes control plane.

hw: HP EliteDesk 800 G2
cpu: i7-6700 · 8 threads
ram: 32 GB
disk: 1 TB SSD (ZFS)

baratheon

“Ours Is the Fury”

NAS

Serves NFS to the cluster for media, photos, app data and the control-plane disks. Snapshotted and backed up off-site with restic.

hw: Dell PowerEdge
disk: 42 TB usable · ZFS

greyjoy

“We Do Not Sow”

Backups & compute

Proxmox Backup Server for every VM in the cluster, plus a Kubernetes control-plane node and two workers.

hw: Dell PowerEdge R730xd
cpu: 2× Xeon E5-2690 v4 · 56 threads
ram: 64 GB
disk: 24 × 900 GB · 2× RAIDZ2

arryn

“As High as Honor”

Kubernetes & Ugaris

Ugaris dev, pre-production and production, the replicated MariaDB cluster, PostgreSQL and Valkey, CI runners, monitoring, and Talos nodes on a ZFS pool.

hw: Dell PowerEdge R730xd
cpu: 2× Xeon E5-2680 v4 · 56 threads
ram: 128 GB
disk: 12 × 3 TB · RAIDZ2

The stack

Six Talos nodes, with the three control-plane nodes on three different physical hosts. Any one box can die without taking Kubernetes down with it.

Hypervisor: Proxmox VE 9 cluster
ZFS
Proxmox Backup Server
Kubernetes: Talos Linux
Cilium
MetalLB
Traefik
cert-manager
GitOps: ArgoCD
Sealed Secrets
Terraform
Ansible
Observability: Prometheus
Grafana
Loki
Alertmanager
Uptime Kuma
Network: UniFi Dream Machine Pro
USW Pro 24 PoE
3× U7 Pro
10+ VLANs

What it runs

Ugaris (dev · ppe · prod)
Smart home & cameras
Media & audiobooks
Photo library
Password vault
DNS ad-blocking
Side-project sites
Self-hosted AI tooling
Off-site backups

Do I need a six-node Kubernetes cluster at home? No. But most of what I use at work I learned here first, usually while something was on fire.

The homelab odyssey

# projects

Other things I've built and run.

Small sites for small communities. Most of them run on the homelab too.

Card game · Android & web

Ons Klaverjas

Klaverjassen like at the kitchen table: big Dutch cards, no rush, free and without ads. Play against the computer or online with family and friends, with challenges, tournaments and lessons for people who are new to the game.

Kotlin
TypeScript
PostgreSQL
coturn

onsklaverjas.nl

Community site · Age of Mythology

AoM Guides

God guides, strategies, videos and recorded games for every version of Age of Mythology, from the original to Retold. Recently rebuilt from PHP 7.4 to a modern stack.

TypeScript
PostgreSQL
Docker

aomguides.com

Guide · Old-school MMO

Ashen Empires: Beginner's Route

A quest-by-quest route from the beach of Valinor to level 30. The whole guide is one Markdown file, and the walkthrough images get collected and credited automatically.

Python
Markdown
GitHub Pages

eddoww.github.io/ashen-empires-beginners-guide

Gaming community · since 2012

Uncut Gaming

A multi-game community founded in 2012: League, Minecraft and ARK, with TeamSpeak, forums and meet-ups in Greece, England, Belgium and the Netherlands. The servers are quiet now, but the Discord is still there.

Community
TeamSpeak
Forums

uncutgaming.com

# writing

Stuff I've written.

# life

Away from the keyboard.

I grew up in the Netherlands and moved to Norway in 2011. After years in Bærum and Oslo we settled in Vestfold in 2025, where I live with my wife and our son.

When I'm not behind a screen I'm usually at a table playing board games, or Dungeons & Dragons whenever the group manages to find a date that works for everyone.

Dungeons & Dragons

The best kind of multiplayer. Of course I ended up self-hosting a tool for our campaign notes.

Metal & Graspop

Graspop Metal Meeting in Belgium. I built a planner so my friends and I could rate the bands and plan our days.

Keeping old games alive

Astonia, Ashen Empires, Age of Mythology. Old games deserve guides, servers and people who still care about them.

Smart home tinkering

Zigbee, Home Assistant, and cameras that can tell a person from a passing car. Most of the time anyway.

Say hello.

Want to talk platform work, homelab stuff or Spirit Island? Or did you play Astonia twenty years ago? Send me an email.

[email protected]