Testimonal SURFnet

About SURFnet.

SURFnet ensures that researchers, instructors, and students can work together simply and effectively with the aid of ICT. It therefore promotes, develops, and operates a trusted, connecting ICT infrastructure that facilitates optimum use of the possibilities offered by ICT.

About Aves IT.

Aves IT has over 20 years’ experience in designing, securinges and, migratinges, designs, architects, integrates IT infrastructures and integration and orchestrates orchestration of applications in IT Infrastructures. We do this for fully owned, hybrid, cloud or multi-cloud based architectures.

Aves IT secures, migrates, designs, architects, integrates and orchestrates applications in IT Infrastructures
We do this for fully owned, hybrid, cloud or multi-cloud based architectures, with over 20 years of experience.

Infrastructure services.

In 2014 SURFnet was approached by 6 universities of applied science who asked SURFnet to offer a broad set public IaaS services meeting a very strict set of (security, privacy and governance) requirements. As SURFnet did not have the skillsets available which were needed to develop this service, Nils Vogels from Aves IT was brought in (end 2015) as one of two architects who investigated the requirements and proposed that a Cloud Management Portal (CMP) was to be used to create the single pane of glass access to all providers needed to enable institutions to pursue a real multi-cloud strategy.

A market analysis was undertaken to see which CMP’s would be able to meet the requirements drafted by the institutions. CloudBolt was quickly identified as one of the potential products, given the ability of CloudBolt to operate on-premises, with support for multi-tenancy and at the time 15 different cloud technologies. Nils helped draft the technical and functional requirements for the tender selecting the CMP, which was won by CloudBolt.

Nils has been given the responsibility to develop the CMP for SURFnet’s multi-tenant use and was able to have an initial version operational ready for production within three months’ time, connecting initially two VMware based resource sets and preparing for many more cloud vendor technologies, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack. Nils quickly became the trusted technical advisor and integrator of the CMP, ensured all issues were dealt with quickly, gave trainings on the usage of the CMP, created roadmaps with feature enhancements and oversaw the tactical relation with CloudBolt, initiating, motivating and managing all requests for enhancements and bug fixes. Nils performed all these tasks in an unsupervised way, taking control of all these processes while keeping stakeholders informed.

Nils has the ability to explain technical issues in layman’s’ terms, is fully accepted as a peer by our highly technical network and identity management engineers and write reports on a tactical/strategic level while working completely unsupervised.

Nils has been instrumental for the success of the SURFcumulus services (insert link to English website?) and we wholeheartedly recommend him to any organization looking for an architect on cloud infrastructure services or setting up a CMP.