I’m Rutger Blom, a Senior Consultant at Advania with around 30 years of experience in IT. I help customers design and build private cloud platforms, bringing together architectural thinking and hands-on engineering.

Much of my work centres on VMware Cloud Foundation and NSX, alongside Kubernetes and infrastructure automation. My interest extends beyond the individual technologies to how they fit together: how requirements become design decisions, how teams consume a platform, and how that platform remains understandable and manageable as it evolves.

Networking and security have been a strong thread throughout my career. That background still shapes my approach, particularly when working through dependencies, failure scenarios, and responsibility boundaries. I value clear designs, deliberate trade-offs, and automation that makes a system easier to operate.

I’m also exploring how AI changes infrastructure engineering. In my lab, I experiment with technical knowledge systems and AI agents that can collaborate on architecture, implementation, and troubleshooting. I’m interested in what these systems can reliably do, how their work should be validated, and where human judgement and accountability remain essential.

This blog is where I share that work: architectural reflections, practical guides, lab experiments, and the details that only emerge when a design meets a running environment. Writing helps me test my own understanding and make what I learn useful to others.

Born and raised in the Netherlands, I now live in southern Sweden with my wife and our two children. Photography has also been an important interest outside work.

A brain injury a few years ago changed my life and left me with some physical limitations. It also changed my perspective on time, health, and priorities—things I try to keep in view alongside my curiosity for technology.

“The longer I work with technology, the more I value clarity. The longer I live, the more I value time.”