Hi, I’m René
I build cloud platforms for a living and tinker with them at home for fun.
I’m based in Queens, New York. I’ve spent the last 20+ years in cloud architecture and platform engineering — most recently as Chief Cloud Architect at SAP Business Technology Platform, where I led infrastructure strategy, SRE practices, and architectural governance for a 500-person engineering organization building services on AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Before SAP, I spent several years in the SAP Commerce Cloud world managing Kubernetes migrations, stream processing platforms, and the Cloud DevOps team I built from 2 to 25 engineers across three countries.
And before all of that — back in 2006 — I co-founded commercetools with two friends in Munich. We built a multi-tenant eCommerce SaaS platform from scratch, including hosting it on our own hardware in a data center. I left in 2010 to move to New York. Watching it grow to a ~$1.9B valuation has been one of the more surreal experiences of my career.
What This Blog Is
This blog is where I document the things I’m learning, breaking, and occasionally fixing.
Most of it revolves around my homelab — a small Proxmox cluster running Kubernetes, managed with Terraform, secured with its own CA. It’s the kind of work that keeps me connected to the actual systems I architect at a larger scale professionally. There’s something clarifying about being the only person on the pager.
Topics tend to cluster around:
- Infrastructure: Proxmox, Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, Ansible
- Networking & security: TLS/PKI, Twingate, VPN, homelab CA management
- AI & LLM tooling: Local model deployment with Ollama, RAG pipelines, AI-assisted workflows
- Development tooling: VS Code setup, Python tooling, scripting odds and ends
- Platform engineering patterns: When a homelab problem connects to something larger
I don’t post on a schedule. I write when I’ve solved something worth documenting.
Professionally
My focus is on the intersection of platform engineering, cloud architecture, and operational excellence:
- Multi-cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure
- SRE: SLI/SLO frameworks, incident management, on-call operations
- FinOps and infrastructure cost optimization
- API strategy, event-driven systems, Apache Kafka
- Architectural governance — standards that scale across large engineering organizations
- AI-assisted development workflows and LLM tooling
I write Go, know my way around Python and I am still thinking Java, and have a soft spot for infrastructure that explains itself.
Let’s Connect
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rené-welches-6512113
- GitHub: github.com/renewelches
I’m always interested in conversations about platform engineering, cloud architecture, homelab projects, or any of the above. Feel free to reach out.