# Ed Stuurman > Ed Stuurman (stuurman.com) is an infrastructure and site reliability engineer based in Japan. This site is his personal workbench documenting real-world cloud architecture, Terraform automation, bare-metal enterprise hardware, homelab experiments, and photography. Ed Stuurman has over a decade of hands-on experience in mission-critical engineering environments. His background spans enterprise hardware escalations and Linux kernel dump diagnostics at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), through scaling predictive email security and distributed logging platforms at Vade. He has used Linux as his daily driver since 2006, specializes in AWS and multi-region infrastructure as code with Terraform, and runs virtualization and storage experiments in his homelab. - **Name:** Ed Stuurman (Edouard Stuurman) - **Role:** Infrastructure & Site Reliability Engineer - **Location:** Japan - **Website:** https://www.stuurman.com - **GitHub:** https://github.com/edstuurman - **GitLab:** https://gitlab.com/edstuurman - **LinkedIn:** https://www.linkedin.com/in/edouard-s-783774b9/ ## Core Pages - [Home](https://www.stuurman.com/): Overview of Ed Stuurman, workbench introduction, featured photography, and recent articles. - [About](https://www.stuurman.com/about/): Detailed engineering background, career history at HPE and Vade, homelab philosophies, personal pursuits (niwaki garden pruning, skiing), and professional recommendations. - [Blog](https://www.stuurman.com/blog/): Complete archive of technical write-ups, architecture case studies, and homelab experiments. - [Photography](https://www.stuurman.com/photography/): Curated portfolio of landscape, architecture, and street photography captured in Japan and abroad. - [Tags & Topics](https://www.stuurman.com/tags/): Taxonomy of technical topics and categorized posts. ## Engineering Articles - [Overhauling the Stack: Astro 7, Tailwind v4, and Converting to AI-Assisted Engineering](https://www.stuurman.com/blog/2026-10-27-converting-to-ai-assisted-engineering/): How a routine framework upgrade turned into a full modernization sprint—and why I finally became a believer in AI pair programming. - [Umami: What I Learned While Eating a Big Serving of Humble Pie.](https://www.stuurman.com/blog/2025-11-27-aws-dsql-amplify-umami-analytics/): Umami isn’t just one of the basic flavors. it’s also the name of an open source website analytics suite. In Japanese, umami means “delicious savory taste.” Unfortunately, my experience was anything but: I ended up eating copious amounts of humble pie while exploring how cheaply I could self-host this software stack on AWS. - [Running a Mail Server Is Cool. Until SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and blocklists remind you what it really costs.](https://www.stuurman.com/blog/2025-11-26-email-deliverability/): Self-hosting gives you control, but also every responsibility and every failure point. Modern email is not simple anymore. it is an ecosystem you must constantly manage. And that’s why I choose to pay for a mail provider instead. - [I Also Fell Down the Rabbit Hole: Building a Fully Automated Astro Blog Pipeline with VSCode, GitLab, Amplify and CloudFront.](https://www.stuurman.com/blog/2025-11-25-building-an-astro-site/): Because every infrastructure engineer eventually builds yet another automated static site pipeline. - [Using Terraform (HCL) to design, deploy, and manage repeatable multi-region AWS infrastructure.](https://www.stuurman.com/blog/2025-12-18-terraform-aws-mrap-s3/): Automating a setup that takes an hour to complete manually, because repetition is a problem best solved once. - [Reducing compute capacity and retiring unnecessary workloads in a home-lab to optimize power consumption and improve overall efficiency.](https://www.stuurman.com/blog/2025-12-9-homelab-vmware-vsan-proxmox/): Home-labing is a hobby that can expand far beyond its original scope without you even noticing. Once you have a rack, the instinct to fill it is almost automatic. In my case, I ended up with two smaller racks, and that was all the encouragement I needed. - [Improving time to first byte, an intro to S3 Multi Region Access Points, Lambda@Edge functions and CloudFront](https://www.stuurman.com/blog/2025-12-6-aws-mrap-s3-lambda-cloudfront/): Because sometimes a straightforward setup does not suffice ## Topics & Taxonomy - [AWS (Amazon Web Services)](https://www.stuurman.com/tags/aws/): Multi-region S3, CloudFront CDN, Lambda@Edge, and cloud architecture. - [Terraform](https://www.stuurman.com/tags/terraform/): HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), automated provisioning, and repeatable infrastructure as code. - [Homelab](https://www.stuurman.com/tags/homelab/): Server hardware, virtualization, rack topology, network tuning, and power optimization. - [Infrastructure](https://www.stuurman.com/tags/infra/): Core systems engineering, reliability patterns, and bare-metal diagnostics. - [Proxmox VE](https://www.stuurman.com/tags/proxmox/): Open-source virtualization, clustering, and hypervisor management. - [VMware](https://www.stuurman.com/tags/vmware/): ESXi hypervisors, vSAN storage, and hypervisor workload migrations. - [Email & Deliverability](https://www.stuurman.com/tags/email/): SMTP protocols, SPF, DKIM, DMARC authentication, and reputation defense. - [AI & Tooling](https://www.stuurman.com/tags/ai/): Practical adoption of AI coding assistants, agentic pair programming, and engineering workflows. ## Full Context - [Full Site Archive (llms-full.txt)](https://www.stuurman.com/llms-full.txt): Complete, concatenated Markdown archive of all core articles and profile content for direct ingestion into LLMs or RAG systems.