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Erwin’s Beefs: cloud native group therapy
At the close of Edgecase 2025, Principal Consultant Erwin de Keijzer (TrueFullstaq) takes the stage. Time for Erwin’s Beefs! It’s 2025, so surely we’ve had more than enough time to adapt to modern software engineering practices. This session is about the times we don’t, and how embracing them properly could make life so much easier.
Group therapy: cloud native frustrations
Erwin has spent about fifteen years in the cloud native space, consulting across dozens of companies. Along the way, a few things started to really bother him. Like, really bother him. According to Erwin, in 2025, things we should not do are deploying the LGTM stack and calling observability ‘done’, shipping an application and tossing it over the wall for Ops to handle, sticking with Jenkins. “I’ll tell you what we should and shouldn’t be doing,” he says. “Or hey, maybe just treat this as a group therapy session. Together we’ll figure out how to make the cloud native world a better place.”
DevOps: stop separating Dev and Ops
First up: DevOps. Or rather, the false divide between Dev and Ops. By now, we all should know better. If you still separate developers and operations, with handovers in between, you’re doing it wrong. Then there’s horizontal scaling. “Sounds odd, right? But don’t overpay. You’d be surprised how much performance you can squeeze out of a single beefy machine.”
Automate everything (yes, everything)
Next: non-cloud-native applications. Erwin doesn’t hate them, exactly. Cloud native, after all, doesn’t mean only in the cloud. It means portable, environment-agnostic, scalable. He throws a question to the audience: “Who here has used SSH to fix a problem in the past year?” Erwin clarifies: he’s talking non-production environments. His point? SSH is manual labor. And if it’s manual, it can be automated. “I heard someone say, we don’t have time to automate. No! In this business, the only time you have is for automation.” The same goes for AI and LLMs: “Just use them,” he says. But don’t ask an LLM to do data analysis. That’s data, not language. “But yes, you can absolutely have an LLM generate code to do data analysis. And honestly? It’s fun. I just love the little jokes they come up with.”
Little jabs: from Jenkins to mental health
Humans have jokes too. At one point, a slide appears with just the word Jenkins. Silence. Then laughter. Next! ... Erwin keeps moving: Python package managers (“UV makes Python fun again”), observability (“add open custom telemetry”), kubectl apply, the lack of proper dev environments (“come on, it’s 2025”), YAML (“what’s not to love?”), and (K)YAML (“check it out!”). But in between these jabs, he brings up something unexpected, and important. Mental health. “Winter is coming, days get darker. Watch your mental well-being. Two years ago, I hit a dip. Happens every year as I suffer from seasonal depression. I became unpleasant to be around. My advice: talk about it. It doesn’t make you weak. Drop the taboo.”
