Leipzig, Germany
Michael Raeck
CTO at Paladyn and independent platform engineer. I build the product and the platform it runs on: Laravel applications on Kubernetes, from the first commit to production operations.
What I do
- PaladynCTO, since 2026 Venture builder with several products. Our largest, Woonzorgweb, is a Belgian care-home directory with around 150k users a month. I'm leading its rebuild from a legacy Drupal stack to Laravel and Filament, on a Kubernetes platform I stood up on day one: OVHcloud, CloudNativePG, ArgoCD, External Secrets, Velero.
- VantralisFounder My consulting company. Platform engineering for teams that need Kubernetes, GitOps and PostgreSQL to work in regulated, ISO 27001-certified environments — the setup I ran as a platform engineer before going independent.
- eucloudcost.comSide project Price comparison for 30+ European cloud and Kubernetes providers, with real storage benchmarks, reference OpenTofu setups and an open dataset that has started attracting outside contributors.
Kubernetes ArgoCD OpenTofu Talos
CloudNativePG PostgreSQL Kyverno Velero
Laravel Filament Livewire Valkey
Grafana k6 Claude Code Linear
Talk
ContainerDays Hamburg, September 2026
Running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes in Production Day 2 Operations with CloudNativePG
Everything that happens after the first kubectl apply:
backups to an object store, point-in-time recovery, an in-place major upgrade from 17 to 18, and a replica cluster
for disaster recovery. Five demos, all recorded against a local kind cluster and reproducible from the repo.
Open source
- eu-cloud-prices dataset The open data behind eucloudcost.com: VPS and managed Kubernetes pricing across 30+ European providers, kept current by a weekly bot that opens schema-validated PRs per provider.
- opentofu-kubernetes-ovhcloud opentofu Reference setup for managed Kubernetes on OVHcloud: private vRack networking, ArgoCD, Velero, API IP restrictions. Siblings for Exoscale and Infomaniak
- hetzner-talos talos Talos Linux Kubernetes on Hetzner Cloud, with a worked example.
- argocd-cluster-essentials gitops The baseline every cluster gets before a workload does, as ArgoCD ApplicationSets.
Before
- DKMS — Platform engineer in an ISO 27001 environment: multi-cluster Kubernetes, ArgoCD ApplicationSets, CNPG, Kyverno, Velero, Renovate. Kyverno generate rules that turned a new database CR into bucket, credentials and backup schedule automatically — across a hundred-plus databases.
- SDA SE — Technical product owner.
- 1337 UGC — Lead Developer - scaled crosswordsolver.com to 1.5M monthly users. on GCP Clusters
- Mucona Media — Founded and exited.