Diederik de Zee

Cloud‑Native & Linux Engineer
(Also with love for networking and observability)

Get in touch

About

I'm a 24-year-old platform engineer living in the Achterhoek region of the Netherlands. I specialize in building reliable, cloud-native infrastructure that helps teams ship with confidence—from Kubernetes clusters and CI/CD pipelines to end-to-end observability stacks. I enjoy turning technical complexity into elegant, maintainable systems. I'm also passionate about networking (especially BGP and routing), hosting technology, and I spend my free time climbing walls and running my own ASN-backed network.

Experience

  1. Consultant – Esprit ICT

    Guided customers through automation and cloud‑native adoption, translating business goals into scalable, resilient designs backed by Linux and open‑source tooling.

    • Cloud Workplace Engineer – Kenter (Alliander)
      Supported the design and rollout of a modern workplace platform and contributed to Azure cloud networking for improved scalability and connectivity.
    • Platform & Linux Engineer – LOGEX
      Helped build and mature the LOGEX healthcare analytics platform: codified infrastructure with Terraform in Bitbucket pipelines across Azure and GCP, and rolled out a full observability stack—Thanos, Prometheus and Grafana—on Kubernetes to give teams real‑time insight from commit to production.
  2. Lead Engineer, Service Operations – Sue B.V.

    Helped setup/founded and led the Managed Services team. Wrote ITIL‑aligned processes, built an observability stack with Grafana, Loki and OpenTelemetry, and drove service improvements from pre‑sales to run‑books. Example projects include setting up managed Proxmox full-fledged management with Operations workflows and runbooks for customers like Prinses Maxima Centrum, RijkZwaan.

  3. Project Engineer – Sue B.V.

    Designed and built cloud landing zones in GCP, AWS and Azure with Terraform, GitLab and Argo CD streamlined structures. Automated deployment of Elastic Cloud and 20+ open‑source components, accelerating delivery for SCOR France & ReMark International.

  4. Lead – Datacenter Operations + Linux engineer – Shock Media B.V.

    Modernised datacentre operations and helped architecting network setups. Replaced manual workflows with Ansible automation across Red Hat and Debian fleets and streamlined virtualisation management.

  5. Linux & Network Engineer – Shock Media B.V.

    Kept 1,300+ VMs and network devices humming (DirectAdmin/Plesk-based, LAMP stacks, HA clusters, Virtualization, networking, etc), delivered 2nd/3rd‑line support, and boosted reliability with Zabbix monitoring and Ansible automation.

Projects

Backbone.direct (2023 – Present)

I run a public network under ASN 50917 with four Amsterdam PoPs linked by a dedicated fibre ring.

Stack: eBGP, iBGP, MED, VXLAN, EVPN, Routing, Fibre Optics, Arista, Cisco, Juniper, Linux, Proxmox, SONiC, and much more.

Skills

Operating systems

Debian-based (Ubuntu, Mint, etc included) • RedHat-based (RHEL, CentOS, Alma, RockyLinux, CloudLinux) • Free/OpenBSD • Arch Linux • MacOS • Windows (preferably not, but i don't hate it)

Hosting & Web Servers

DirectAdmin • Apache • NGINX • (Open)LiteSpeed • Caddy • PHP servers (FPM, LSPHP, FCGI, mod_php) • NPM-based • Sidekiq/Puma • Performance tuning

Databases

MySQL • MariaDB • Galera/Percona clusters • Azure SQL • Amazon RDS • Cloud SQL (GCP) • PostgreSQL • REDIS • Clickhouse

Networking

TCP/IP • VLAN • VXLAN • MPLS • BGP • SRv6 • Arista • Cisco • Dell • eBPF/XDP • Cilium • Firewalling • Cilium • SONiC • DPDK (basic)

Containerisation & Virtualisation

Kubernetes • Docker • LXC • KVM/QEMU (Libvirt/proxmox/openstack/cloudstack) • Proxmox • Pacemaker • Heartbeat

Infrastructure as Code & CI/CD

Terraform / OpenTofu • Ansible • GitLab CI/CD • Bitbucket Pipelines • Bash scripting

Programming & Scripting

Bash • PHP (Laravel) • SQL • Python • Go (basic) • HTML • CSS

Cloud Platforms

Google Cloud (advanced) • AWS (advanced) • Azure • Cloudflare • Imperva • SolusVM • Virtualizor • OpenStack • CloudStack • ESXI

Observability & logging

Elastic Cloud (+integrations) • Elasticsearch • Kibana • Logstash • FluentBit • Grafana • Prometheus • Mimir • Thanos • Loki • OpenTelemetry • syslogd • Zabbix • Icinga(/Nagios)

Certifications

Contact

Need help with your platform or just want to chat? Reach out:

hallo@ikbendiederik.nl