Johannes Koch

AWS DevTools Hero | Builder by heart | Building @nexus_share | | Enterprise Architect @ FICO
| Opinions are my own

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

Prepping my re:Invent Code Talk and remembering why live coding can be terrifying: no slides to hide a broken build behind or a failed deployment.

60 minutes, onboard a service through a platform, live. If it breaks, everyone watches it break. Worth it though. Nothing proves a golden path like running it in front of people.

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

EKS Auto Mode plus managed Argo CD, ACK and kro already took most of the node babysitting away. What I want next: managed Crossplane, easier networking defaults, and faster cluster provisioning so ephemeral clusters are actually practical. The data plane got solved. The control-plane experience is where the next wins are.

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

Heading to Mannheim for CLC 2026. If you're there, say hi. Two topics I care about, one theme that keeps recurring across both: people don't want more options, they want the right default and an honest number.

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

The money moment in my COM323 demo: change one field, tier standard to critical, and paging flips to 24x7, scan cadence goes daily to hourly, the SLO re-derives. One field, owned by the platform team, in one place.

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

Is multi-region a resilience strategy, or an expensive way to have outages in two places at once?

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

Mannheim this week for CLC 2026. Two talks: platform APIs with Crossplane, and LLM cost reality.

If you're attending, the hallway is where I do my best thinking. Come find me.

#CLC_Conf

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

Reversibility is a feature. In the demo, deleting one Service CR cascade-cleans the deploy, three registrations, the repo and the GitOps record. If a delete leaves ghosts, you built a liability, not a platform.

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

My re:Invent demo bets the memorable moment is one tier change rippling across six systems. What's a demo moment that made you want the thing on the spot?

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

When you abstract Kubernetes away from developers, who's left holding it when the abstraction leaks?

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

If an agent can apply the same Service CR a human does, is your portal a feature or a step you haven't removed yet?

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

Writing blogs in 2026: AI made the first draft free, which means the only scarce thing left is having something true to say. The draft was never the valuable part.

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

AWS Community Builders isn't a reward for expertise. It's a program for people who consistently share, at any level: blogs, demos, talks, open source. Build in public first, then apply in the next cohort.

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

The point of a paved road isn't to forbid the dirt track. It's to make the paved road so good nobody wants the dirt.

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

Is a fast deploy a feature, or just a faster way to find out you shipped the wrong thing?

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

Use a CRD as your platform's API and you get declarative state, reconciliation, RBAC, audit logging and GitOps for free. That's the CLC talk with Sönke in one sentence.

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

I claim onboarding should be three fields: name, team, tier. How many fields does your real onboarding form have, and how many does anyone actually understand?

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

If an AI could inherit one piece of your context between sessions, what would save you the most re-explaining?

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

If there's no AWS user group near you, start one. They're run by volunteers. That's not a barrier, it's an opening.

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

I think the agent should onboard a service exactly like a human: same Service CR, same guardrails. What's the one thing in your platform you'd never let an agent apply unreviewed?

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

Build-in-public honesty: I ship more side projects than is sensible because each is a different stress test of how far agentic coding gets me on something real with real users.

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

We test Crossplane compositions like application code, before a developer's first onboarding. Composition patches fail opaquely and the feedback loop is slow; the test suite is what turned a three-month composition into a boring one.