Welcome đź‘‹

My name is Yanic Small and I am a cloud architect. This is my story and how I got here.

Career Journey

2010–2013: Ariba & SAP - Tech Support

I started my career in 2010 as a tech support intern at Ariba, which was later acquired by SAP. I ended up managing different AD policies, bare-metal servers, and different SysAdmin responsibilities. This early experience taught me the importance of understanding infrastructure and the basics of IT operations.

2013–2015: Airwatch — DevOps Engineer

After Ariba, I joined Airwatch as a DevOps Engineer. Here, I got my first real taste of cloud operations and automation. Eventually, Airwatch itself was acquired by VMware. I was able to get hands-on experience with vSphere and other virtualization tooling which set me up in understanding both containerization and cloud infrastructure.

2016–2017: Bettercloud — Senior DevOps Engineer

I then joined Bettercloud as a Senior DevOps Engineer, this is where my cloud and microservice expertise truly took off. I was primarily responsible for releases and had the freedom to improve the process in ways I saw fit.

I had just finished reading The Phoenix Project, and I adapted many of its principles to our workflow:

  • Quality gates for safer deployments
  • Service teams owning fa standardfized CI/CD process
  • Comprehensive release documentation and versioning

This experience shaped how I think about operational excellence and deployment automation to this day.

2017–2020: Backbase — Senior System Engineer → Principal System Engineer

At Backbase, I started as a Senior System Engineer and progressed to Principal Engineer. This role gave me the opportunity to:

  • Drive technical direction and architecture goals
  • Design and implement DevSecOps practices
  • Architect cloud-agnostic tooling to advance the platform

I dove deeply into major cloud providers while expanding my expertise in Kubernetes, cloud networking, and distributed systems.

2020–Present: Freelance Cloud Architect

In 2020, my wife and I made the move to Barcelona, where I began my freelance journey as a Cloud Architect. I’ve been fortunate to work with clients (primarily financial institutions) across the US and Europe, helping them with:

  • Cloud strategy and roadmapping
  • Architecture design and implementation
  • Infrastructure modernization
  • Cloud security and compliance
  • CI/CD pipeline design and implementation

What You’ll Find Here

I created this blog to share my knowledge, insights, and hands-on guides from years of production experience. Whether you’re navigating cloud strategy, Kubernetes, DevOps, cloud networking, observability, or security—I hope to help you on your journey.

Let’s build something great together! 🚀