Jeroen van Nieuwenhuizen

About

Professional

IT Infrastructure Specialist | MSc in Computer Science | Open Source & Cloud Enthusiast | Shaping IT Strategy | Building High-Impact Teams | Crafting Scalable & Reliable Systems | Based in Rotterdam & Siegen-Wittgenstein

I work with companies to design, build, and improve their IT infrastructure—whether in the cloud, on-premises, or a mix of both—using Open Source technologies as a foundation. My focus is on making systems more reliable, scalable, and easier to manage.

I’m based in both the Rotterdam (NL) area and the Siegen-Wittgenstein (DE) region, and I regularly work with international teams across Europe. I’ve led technical projects and teams across borders, helping them collaborate more effectively, move faster, and take ownership of what they build.

My leadership style is hands-on and intent-driven—I stay close to the tech while creating space for teams to grow, take initiative, and work with clarity and trust. Whether it’s modernizing infrastructure, building automation pipelines, or leading cloud migrations, I aim to leave teams stronger and systems better than I found them.

Personal

In my free time, you’ll often find me cycling through the hills, walking with our loyal Austrian Pinscher, or being outnumbered by our four cats. I have a fondness for mindsports like chess, xiangqi, go, and shogi—each humbling in its own way, and all collectively requiring more than one lifetime to truly master.

When not on a board or a trail, I spend my time reading, skiing when the season allows, and falling down rabbit holes of curiosity. Whether it's a new technology or an obscure philosophy, I’ve made a habit of always learning—rarely linearly, but always relentlessly.

Technical Skills

An incomplete selection of my technical skills. An overview of my certifications can be found here.

Automation

SaltStack
Ansible
Puppet
Terraform

Linux

RedHat Enterprise Linux
SuSe Linux Enterprise Server
Ubuntu
Debian

Monitoring

Nagios
Zabbix
Prometheus
Sensu

Cloud

OpenStack
AWS
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Docker (Swarm)
Ceph Storage

Programming

Python
Perl
PHP
Shell Scripting

Databases

MySQL
PostgreSQL
Cassandra
MongoDB

Projects

Short summaries of projects I have been involved in.

Migrating a customer's billing system to Oracle Cloud.

Managed Service Provider

Cloud Consultant

Design and implementation of a hashicorp stack consisting of Vault, Nomad and Consul.

Domain Name Registry

Cloud Consultant

I advised on the alternatives for SUSE OpenStack, and helped them switch to the new RedHat OpenStack platform.

Automotive Company

OpenStack Consultant

Solving a problem within their Rook setup as well as sharing Ceph knowledge and giving advise on how to improve their Ceph setup

Vegetable Breeding Company

Ceph Consultant

Improving, upgrading, managing and rolling out 1000+ desktops using ansible.

Government Organisation

Ansible Consultant

Design and implementation of the HA infrastructure for their website on a cloud platform.

Online Liquor Seller

Cloud Consultant

I detected and solved misconfigurations in their Ceph deployments avoiding major problems in case of data center room outages.

Automotive Company

Ceph Consultant

I helped the customer improve the way they use SaltStack within their organisation as well as improving their knowledge of how to use SaltStack.

International Organisation

SaltStack Consultant

Design and implementation of a completely Open Source based OpenStack environment.

Government Organisation

OpenStack Consultant

Building a dashboard using Flask and Python to show the status of all OpenStack environments in one overview.

Automotive Company

Python Programmer

Migrating part of their infrastructure to a cloud environment.

Supermarket

Cloud Consultant

Designing and building their Big Data platform in a High Performance Cloud Computing Platform.

Accounting Company

Cloud & Big Data Consultant

Coaching the team on building a complete Open Source based OpenStack solution.

Government Organisation

Agile Coach

Upgrade of their Ceph environment to a newer version.

Eductional Institute

Ceph Consultant

Teaching SaltStack to one of their teams as well as helping the team setup their SaltStack environment.

Global IT services Company

Saltstack Trainer & Consultant

Management of the systems and applications related to passenger handling and flight planning.

Airline

IT Consultant

Redesign and upgrade of their puppet infrastructure.

Human Resource Provider

Puppet Consultant

Speaking / Teaching

A global overview about the subjects I have given workshops, talks and courses about. A complete overview can be found here.

Speaking

OpenStack
Puppet
HAST
FreeBSD
Bash

Courses

SaltStack
SUSE Enterprise Storage

Workshops

SaltStack
OpenStack
Git
Red Hat Linux
HAST

Contact

Feel free to invite me for dinner if you think we can have an interesting or mutual benefitting conversation. If you have another offer, opportunity, or introduction that might make my life more interesting you can send an email to contact (at) jeroen (dot) se. Due to my other priorities, for example playing with my cats, I’ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests.