About the author

I’m Elias Brange, an AWS Cloud Consultant and AWS Community Builder in the Serverless category. I’m on a mission to drive Serverless adoption and help others on their Serverless AWS journey.

Want to get in touch? Hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter.

My journey

My cloud journey began in 2016, and what a journey it has been! I first entered the industry when DevOps was the trendiest buzzword, and the culture it stands for has resonated with me ever since.

With 7+ years of experience with AWS, I have designed and implemented many solutions in a reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient manner. But making sure everything runs smoothly is only half the battle. I find it extremely rewarding to design applications in a fashion that makes them easy to configure and deploy, as well as bring them from code to production in a fast, safe and reproducible manner.

Starting out

During the first two years of my career, I focused on migrating an existing EC2-based cloud solution into Docker Swarm clusters. We managed everything ourselves; the underlying virtual machines, ELK and TICK stacks for monitoring, Consul for service discovery, application containers, and more. This gave me insights into how much work that goes into operating a self-hosted cloud solution.

Embracing managed services

In 2019, I left the world of Docker Swarm in favor of fully managed AWS services. ECS Fargate replaced Docker Swarm, Aurora replaced SQLServer, SQS and SNS replaced RabbitMQ, and CloudWatch replaced ELK and TICK. Working with fully managed services taught me the value of being able to focus more on implementing business value rather than spending countless hours keeping things afloat.

Going Serverless

In 2020, I had some issues regarding cost and scaling in certain Services, so I started experimenting with Serverless technologies. We built new services using AWS Lambda and DynamoDB instead of ECS Fargate and Aurora. I was amazed by how fast you can iterate and bring value to the market with Serverless, and I have since been a big advocate.

In 2022, I got invited into the AWS Community Builder program in the Serverless category. Through this program, I hope to help others see the value that Serverless brings and help them get started on their journeys.

Game Development

Since 2016, I have, in my spare time, developed games for Android under the name Brulu Games. I have released 10+ games so far, with the most successful one being Hazards which has 50k+ downloads. Not bad for a pet project, huh? I built the games with a Java framework called LibGDX.

Working on the games alone means that I get to experience the complete process required to develop and publish a game. I had to explore and learn about everything from prototyping, development, testing, graphics, monetization, marketing, integrations, and much more.