Intro

Ed Stuurman

I’m an infrastructure and reliability engineer based in Japan. Over the past decade, my work has centered on mission-critical environments where resilience isn't optional—scaling high-throughput mail delivery platforms, distributed observability, and enterprise server architectures.

This site is an extension of my homelab—a place where I document cloud infrastructure automation with Terraform, architectural notes, and deep-dive technical write-ups. I take a practical, hands-on approach: understanding how systems work under the hood, cutting through unnecessary complexity, and building setups that hold up under real production pressure.

Read more about my background

From the Blog

Notes from the homelab: engineering deep-dives, infrastructure setups, and lessons learned along the way. View all articles

1–3 of 7

The 30-Minute "Instant" Cloud Deployment: What AWS Is Actually Doing While Terraform Waits

Cloud marketing promises infrastructure in seconds, yet a greenfield multi-region Terraform apply still leaves you staring at a spinner for half an hour. Here is what is actually happening inside the AWS control plane while you wait.If you listen to cloud keynotes, modern Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is practically instantaneous. You write a few declarative blocks of HCL, type terraform apply, and a globally distributed edge architecture materializes out of thin air.

#AWS#Terraform#CloudFront
6 min read
Ed Stuurman

Ed Stuurman

Infrastructure & Reliability

#Engineering#Architecture#Reflection
4 min read
Ed Stuurman

Ed Stuurman

Infrastructure & Reliability

(updated Nov 5, 2026)
Setup Guide · Part 1

Part 1 — Customizing This Astro Theme: Separating Identity, Narrative, and Datasets from Templates

A practical guide to cloning, running, and customizing this Astro 7.4 + Tailwind CSS v4 site for your own domain—without ever editing a single .astro template.When I first built this site on Astro 5 a year ago—before evolving it into the current Astro 7.4 and Tailwind CSS v4 theme—it started the way most personal engineering sites do: my name, domain, bio paragraphs, social links, and navigation items were scattered directly across a dozen .astro page templates, layout shells, and utility scripts.

#AstroJS#Architecture#Tailwind CSS
12 min read
Ed Stuurman

Ed Stuurman

Infrastructure & Reliability

(updated Nov 5, 2026)
Setup Guide · Part 2

Part 2 (Optional) — Provisioning the Multi-Region AWS Stack with Terraform (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions & Local CLI)

How to provision globally replicated AWS S3 buckets, a Multi-Region Access Point (MRAP), native CloudFront SigV4a Origin Access Control (OAC), ACM SSL, and Route 53 DNS using Terraform 1.10+ via GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, or Local CLI.In late 2025, I wrote two posts about hosting this site across multiple AWS regions using an S3 Multi-Region Access Point (MRAP) behind CloudFront (manual setup and initial Terraform configuration). Back then, connecting CloudFront to an S3 MRAP required deploying a custom Python Lambda@Edge function in us-east-1 just to re-sign origin requests with SigV4a.

#AWS#Terraform#CI/CD
14 min read
Ed Stuurman

Ed Stuurman

Infrastructure & Reliability

(updated Nov 5, 2026)
Setup Guide · Part 3

Part 3 — Automated CI/CD Pipelines, Starter Dry-Run Mode & Deploying to Any Static Host

How The Navigator's dual GitLab CI and GitHub Actions pipelines run in 5-second Starter Template Dry-Run Mode out of the box, how to deploy ./dist/ to Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages, and how scripts/s3-deploy.sh pairs ETag delta sync with 4-tier Edge/Browser Cache-Control headers.Because this theme compiles 100% of its pages, responsive WebP/AVIF photography variants, inline SVG Mermaid diagrams, Satori Open Graph social cards, and machine-readable /llms.txt indexes at build time into ./dist/ (output: 'static'), you are never locked into a single cloud provider.

#CI/CD#Architecture#AWS
8 min read
Ed Stuurman

Ed Stuurman

Infrastructure & Reliability

Why "aws s3 sync" Was Re-Uploading My Entire Site on Every Push (And How We Fixed Our CI/CD Pipeline)

How two sneaky CI/CD traps—npm ci wiping build caches inside node_modules and fresh build mtimes fooling aws s3 sync—turned one-line edits into full 592-file multi-region deployments.When I moved this site off Amplify and onto a globally replicated S3 Multi-Region Access Point (MRAP) behind CloudFront, I thought the CI/CD pipeline was about as simple and done as a static site pipeline gets: build Astro in one stage, run aws s3 sync . s3://my-bucket/ --delete in the next, invalidate CloudFront, and call it a day.

#CI/CD#AWS#Infrastructure
8 min read
Ed Stuurman

Ed Stuurman

Infrastructure & Reliability

View older blog posts

From the Photo Roll

I can be found with a camera sometimes Check out some pictures

1–3 of 7
Winter Hoarfrost — Near the arctic circle
Hollywood Dream by Night — Universal Studios Japan, Osaka
Past and Present — Asakusa, Tokyo
Beacon in the Dark — Minato, Tokyo
Golden Lattice — Mori Tower, Roppongi, Tokyo
2B Gallery Facade — Tokyo, Japan
Shibazakura Carpet — Yamanashi, Japan
View the full photo gallery

From the Log

Quick notes, homelab updates, and micro-discoveries from everyday tinkering. Browse the full log stream

1–3 of 7
View all log entries