Robert Kloosterhuis
Technologist Cloud Native
- Den Haag, Netherlands
- rkloosterhuis@itq.nl
At ITQ, in the role of 'Technologist', I am the practice-lead for the 'Platforms' part of our Cloud-Native proposition and team. I am responsible for keeping on top of the developments and practices in the cloud-native space, the CNCF Ecosystem, and act as platform architect for Kubernetes deployments and IDPs
At customers I take on the roles such as technical architect, product owner, or technical project lead regarding cloud-native engagements and projects.
I place business outcomes first. I engage with customers both at the tactical, and strategic level to help them structure their thinking and approach to cloud-native platform engineering, and the best practices that underpin how to be successful with these technologies.
At ITQ, I am involved in all pre-sales efforts regarding cloud-native consultancy. I manage our relationships with our vendor contacts, I help manage engagement assignments for our team, matching the right skillsets to the right job, and am involved in many community and educational efforts both inside and outside of ITQ, and lead our yearly delegation to cloud-native events such as Kubecon.
I like organizing things and jumping into situations where I know I can add value. In calls I am highly engaged and will often be the one leading the conversation or the one to structure the plan or outline a technical architecture.
I am very fast to learn team and company dynamics and am able to quickly analyze situations, both technically and politically. My primary strength is to help explain, break down, and structure complex technical concepts, challenges, projects, and implementations, and to help connect the right people and organizational parts together to create formulas for success.
I love connecting the dots for people. Our industry can be hard to understand and our technology stacks are becoming deeper and more complex.
I am using my 24+ year experience to help customers figure out -how- to think about IT architecture and process, while keeping one foot firmly rooted in the actual tech. I am often highly energized about the technology I am working with! I really love tech and what to see myself, my colleagues, and our customers succeed!
For the last 4 years, CBS has started adopting Cloud-Native platforms such as Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. Since the middle of 2023, CBS has embarked on building a second generation Kubernetes service, based entirely on Open Source components. We have named the platform 'Kubit' and it will become the basis for CBS' strategic platform initiatives going forward, such as building out an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) and potentially many other services supporting the statistics and data-science needs of the CBS business.
Inside Kubit, I am one of the 2 Platform architects, focusing on the Kubernetes Runtime layer, and Workload Cluster Design and Management, built around Suse Rancher Server, RKE2, Terraform, Powershell, ArgoCD, Argo Worklows, Cilium, and many other staple CNCF ecosystem tools.
I take on many platform owner responsibilities; laying our feature and development roadmap, organizing and prioritizing work, coordinating with stakeholders and bringing the right people together to tackle both operational issues as well as feature development.
I also operate as a technical lead for the k8s-runtime sub-team, and will assign work, take charge of troubleshooting efforts relating to low-level platform issues, with technologies such as Cilium, networking, Rancher, storage, and help the team structure Kubernetes cluster Architecture and Design.
At the Kubit overall-level, I am a part of the leading team, and help coordinate and develop team processes, documentation, stakeholder-management and engage in Platform evangelism in the wider organization.
Over 2024, regularly consulted with Fujifilm Labs Netherlands, around enabling adoption of Rancher and RKE2. This included tool/method selection, explaining and training on concepts and deployment of customer-specific Kubernetes workloads.
At ITQ, as a 'Technologist' for platforms, I specialize in Cloud-Native platform engineering specifically and cloud native technologies broadly. I help enable ITQ and my colleagues in delivering the products and technologies that enable cloud native platform creation and management at our customers.
I help ITQ's customers in their cloud-native journey, by consulting with them on strategy; - by helping them ask and answer the right questions modern application development, - and by helping them in -how- to think about modern-application platforms and the application architectures that will help deliver them value.
As a part of this role, I am involved in all pre-sales efforts regarding cloud-native consultancy. I manage our relationships with our vendor contacts, I help manage engagement assignments for our team, matching the right skillsets to the right job, and am involved in many community and educational efforts both inside and outside of ITQ, and lead our yearly delegation to cloud-native events such as Kubecon.
From 2022 onwards, I am engaged in consultancy with the Business Solution Services branch of the CBS IT organization. In this role I advise their principle architects around all subjects relating to cloud-native. I am engaged with them to help define a strategy around platform engineering, the design and implementation of a technology stack that will lead to a full Internal Developer Platform (IDP), and the overall strategy around developer enablement and onboarding.
Working via ITQ, I am currently part of the Application Platform Team (APT) at CBS. The APT builds and manages 2 application platforms that developers can use to deploy their code and applications on to: VMware Tanzu Application Services (TAS) and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated TKGi).
In this role, I assisted the APT team in any and all activities relating to supporting and updating the platforms, and I am engaged in architecting the deployment of a new version of TKGi. This deployment was completed end of 2022. I am currently engaged with this team in building a next-generation Kubernetes service based on Suse Rancher.
Working via ITQ, I helped create a container platform team within CM.com, to productize their Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated edition (TKGi) platform, and to help facilitate their developer teams in its use. I participated in engineering efforts, and also took on the role as product owner for the team, prioritizing and planning our roadmap.
Via ITQ, I am currently managing the Cloud Native Applications Platform (CNAP) team at
Rijkswaterstaat (Department of Waterways and Public Works), under the IV RWS Netwerken (IRN) group.
Our team manages several Pivotal Cloud Foundry (VMware Tanzu) and (Grape-Up) 'Cloudboostr' Kubernetes environments. We manage day to day operations, build automation using scripting and CI/CD pipelining using Concourse and other tools, and help application teams on-board onto our platforms.
My roles include; Managing customer expectations, defining strategy, facilitate onboarding to our platforms, manage our teams backlog, determine priorities, defining budgets.
This is a very interesting role to be in, at at this time, Rijkswaterstaat is starting to invest significantly into re-architecting their application landscape toward cloud-native technology. Nationally strategic applications that are onboarding with us in Kubernetes and Cloud-Foundry
Via ITQ, I am currently working in the Cloud Native Applications Platform (CNAP) team at
Rijkswaterstaat (Department of Waterways and Public Works), under the IV RWS Netwerken (IRN) group.
Our team manages several Pivotal Cloud Foundry (VMware Tanzu) and (Grape-Up) 'Cloudboostr' Kubernetes environments. We manage day to day operations, build automation using scripting and CI/CD pipelining using Concourse and other tools, and help application teams on-board onto our platforms.
Personally my focus is on BOSH, VMware NSX-T, Terraform, and Kubernetes
In the role of Technical Expert I specialize in the VMware product portfolio with special focus on vSAN, NSX and the vRealize Suite of products.
As part of the consultancy team at CAM, we support and advise other teams such as Platform Consultants and Engineers. We develop guidance and standards, coordinate activities and educate and coach others regarding our specific areas of knowledge.
A core responsibility is coaching and coordinating the work of the engineers. I am finding increasing joy in this new leadership role.
Technical consultancy is also a large part of the Technical Expert role and in this customer-facing capacity we are often involved in technical validations of designs and customer strategy.
Personally, I continue outreach activities to promote CAM and spread product knowledge in the #vCommunity by blogging ((http://thefluffyadmin.net/) , speaking publicly at events and helping organize the #vNSTechcon (https://vnstechcon.nl/)
Inside CAM I have taken a lead role in pushing knowledge regarding modern container orchestration and use of Docker, and cloud-native technologies.
Responsible for management of international infrastructure of our largest corporate customer. Helped design SDDC on NSX with metro cluster, VMworld2015 flagship customer. Advise and assist and help implement solution architecture for customers.
- 48 vSphere hosts spread over 4 international datacenters
- vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC)
- SDDC based around vSphere vRealize Cloud Suite and NSX
- 2000+ Virtual Machines
- OS management of 70+ Windows Server
- Specialist on Storage infrastructure (Brocade, EMC VNX,EMC Vplex,)
- Specialist on all aspects of Hardware Monitoring and Management
- Specialist on VMware NSX
- Specialist on VMware vRealize Operations Manager
- Specialist on core virtualization stack and high-availability
Championing knowledge of micro-services architectures and orchestration technologies like Docker Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Openshift and open-development tooling.
Kubecon / Cloud Native:
Interview: You were told to install kubernetes, now what? A talk with Robert Kloosterhuis of ITQ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQpTjLQM2BY
VMware / Tanzu:
VMTM Community Podcast 'Tanzu for Beginners':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFgbRGDyNdI