Profile

David Sterz

B.Sc. Business Informatics

State-certified IT Specialist - Application Development

Experience

More than 20 years of experience in IT – ranging from system administration and software development to Solutions Architect, Technical Lead, and Consultant.

I have been at home in the cloud computing environment for nearly 19 years. My professional career includes dynamic start-ups, public broadcasting organizations, as well as global enterprise customers in the Consumer IoT and robotics sectors (e.g., Vorwerk, Franka Emika).

I possess extensive, long-standing, hands-on experience in building small to highly complex on-premise, hybrid, and public cloud architectures on AWS, Azure, and GCP – including special regions such as AWS and Azure China.

Furthermore, I bring deep expertise in building sovereign and distributed clouds using open source software, and have proven experience in designing and operating edge computing environments using Kubernetes as a runtime.

Since 2025, I have returned to freelancing and am a member of the DenktMit eG.

Focus Areas

• Cloud Architecture & Platform Engineering: Building highly available, service-oriented platforms and Kubernetes clusters.
• Distributed & Sovereign Clouds: Experience in constructing sovereign and distributed clouds using open source software.
• Edge Computing: Experience in designing and launching edge computing environments using Kubernetes as runtime.
• Cloud Financial Management / FinOps: Establishing cost transparency and sustainable cost optimization for cloud and on-premise workloads.
• Consumer IoT & Serverless: Architecting global, scalable infrastructures handling millions of devices.
• Data Analytics: Design and architecture of cost-efficient, secure Data Lakes.
• Media Engineering: End-to-end solutions in audio and video processing, transcoding, and high-traffic live streaming.
• DevOps & Automation: Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD).

Motivation

Complex architectures, systems, and how they are organized are my true passion.

There is barely anything more exciting to me than planning, building, and continuously improving an architecture to adapt to ever-changing requirements.

I always look at solutions holistically, place a strong emphasis on non-functional requirements, and pragmatically deploy the best-fitting technology, while also taking organizational circumstances into account.

The field of FinOps fascinates me greatly, as it allows me to help clients achieve the optimal value for their IT and cloud expenditures.

Beyond being profoundly passionate about technology, I am defined by being a strong communicator and an excellent team player.

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