Furkan Güngör · Cloud Native Engineer
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01 · about
Cloud, community,
and the long game.
● activeIstanbul · TR
I'm a Cloud Native Engineer at bestcloudfor.me. The job is "get dropped into a customer's environment and make production behave". Cluster designs, GitOps pipelines, secrets and identity, the cost spreadsheet nobody wants to maintain. Mostly Kubernetes: EKS when we can, RKE2 or kubeadm when the customer can't go cloud, hybrid setups when nobody can agree. I work across all of them.
The customers are a mix of sectors. Retail and e-commerce, fintech, SaaS, cybersecurity, marketing tech, logistics, dev-tooling startups, hospitality groups. Some run on prod-grade Kubernetes at scale, some are mid-migration from on-prem GitLab and a fifteen-year-old Active Directory. The interesting part is rarely the tool. It's the customer who needs spend cut by half and won't take downtime as an answer.
The rest of my time goes into community work, technical events, and sharing what I learn through talks, workshops, and writing. I enjoy building communities around cloud and tech, while continuing to explore platform engineering, infrastructure, automation, and security. Long-term, I want to keep working on reliable systems at scale and contribute more through writing and the engineering communities I'm part of.
02 · experience
Where I've worked.
Roles
Apr 2024 to PresentJan 2026 to Present
Cloud Native Engineer · Associate
bestcloudfor.me · Istanbul
- 15+ customers, 30+ production environments. AWS is the centre of gravity, but Azure, GCP, SAP, and on-prem all show up depending on who's paying.
- Kubernetes is the constant. EKS, RKE2, kubeadm. Designed clusters, broken them, fixed them, watched them survive things they probably shouldn't have.
- Cut Kubernetes spend by up to 50% on a customer workload. Karpenter, pod affinities, right-sizing, and the boring spreadsheet I refuse to throw away.
- GitOps with ArgoCD (app sets, sync waves, drift detection). CI/CD across GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, whichever tool the customer was already wedded to.
- Owned the observability stack: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch. Built the dashboards the customer actually opens at 3am.
- Locked down the platform: image scans (Trivy), secrets in Vault, mTLS via Istio. The stuff that gets ignored until audit week.
- On-call rotations, incident response, RCAs. Standardised the team's IaC modules.
Oct 2024 to Jan 2026
Cloud Native Engineer · Junior
bestcloudfor.me · Istanbul
- The on-the-floor version of the role above. Customer Kubernetes, on-call rotations, late-night deploys.
- Provisioned infra with Terraform and Ansible across AWS, Azure, GCP, SAP. Each cloud has its own opinion about how a network should work.
- Built CI/CD pipelines and observability stacks for new projects.
- Tightened container security where customers had skipped it: image scans, IAM/RBAC scoping, ingress rules, private registry hygiene.
- Started writing on Medium during this period.
Apr 2024 to Oct 2024
IT Support Specialist
MKS Metal Kapı Sistemleri · Istanbul
- Provided network and endpoint support at a metal-doors factory. Worked on LAN/WAN infrastructure, OS installs, and managing the existing hardware.
- Wrote the company's first IT policy document and ran basic security awareness training for the office teams.
- Also: the role that paved the way for my first AWS certification exam.
Community & mentoring
2021 to PresentMar 2026 to Present
AWS Community Builder
Amazon Web Services · Security cohort
- Selected into the Community Builders program on the Security track.
- Writing technical pieces, speaking at community events, and mentoring on cloud / security career paths.
- Collaborating with AWS Heroes and other Community Builders for joint sessions and content.
May 2024 to May 2026
AWS Student Builder Group Leader
AWS SBG Istanbul · Istanbul University · (ex-AWS Cloud Club Captain · Diamond)
- Took over a 360-member club in 2024. We're over 1,200 now.
- Pulled off Türkiye's first AWS Student Community Day. 400 people, 9 sessions, 6 hours.
- Mentored students through their first AWS certs and into their first jobs. The most rewarding part of the work.
- Earned Diamond Level captain (highest tier, all four badge levels) before the program rebranded to SBG in 2026.
Mar 2024 to Present
Co-Founder
Istanbul University Computer Science Club
- Co-founded the university's first CS student community.
- Workshops, study groups, talks. The basics, done consistently.
Oct 2023 to Jun 2024
Cybersecurity Instructor Assistant
Istanbul University · Center for CS Application & Research
- Helped prepare the cybersecurity curriculum and ran practical sessions.
Oct 2021 to Jun 2023
Founder · Informatics Club
Kartal Anadolu Lisesi · Istanbul
- Started the high school's informatics club in 2021. 15 years old, no idea what I was doing.
- Organised and spoke at the school's cybersecurity conference for 200 attendees.
- Joined CTF competitions with the club. We took first place in one of them.
- Built basic websites and small internal tools for the club.
03 · certifications
Verified on Credly.
04 · writing
Notes from the field.
Cloud architecture, automation, security. Things I learned in production and wanted to write down.
Showing 6 of 16
See all on Medium ↗
AWS · BEDROCK
11 MIN
Mastering Amazon Bedrock Inference Profiles
How to use inference profiles for per-project cost tracking. Useful when finance asks "who used the AI budget?"
AWS · CLOUDFRONT
7 MIN
What Is CloudFront Static Anycast IP and Why Is It Used?
CloudFront doesn't give you static IPs by default. Here's when you actually need them and how the new option works.
AWS · DEVOPS
8 MIN
Automatically Creating CloudWatch Alarms for Dynamic Resources
CloudTrail catches the create event, EventBridge routes it, Lambda creates the alarm. New S3 bucket gets monitored without anyone asking.
SERVERLESS
9 MIN
Automatically Backing Up AWS Cognito User Pools
Cognito doesn't ship a backup story out of the box. Daily snapshots with Lambda + EventBridge, written to S3. Solved.
INFRA · MONITORING
6 MIN
Mapping the Invisible: How Parny InfraMap Brings Clarity to Complex Systems
Real-time topology of your services without drawing a single Visio diagram. Walking through what Parny InfraMap actually does.
DEVOPS
10 MIN
What Is On-Call Management? A Complete Guide
Schedules, escalations, runbooks, burnout. Everything I learned about keeping humans alive while keeping systems up.
05 · talks & community
Some talks I've given.
Conferences, workshops, hands-on sessions. Open to guest spots.
May 2026
Multiplayer Game on AWS, live build
İstanbul Bilişim Zirvesi with Eren Direk. Built and deployed a multiplayer game from scratch. Things broke, we fixed them on stage. The best part of live demos.
Nov 2025
AWS Student Community Day Istanbul
Led the day as AWS Cloud Captain. Türkiye's first AWS Student Community Day, four hundred people, nine sessions, six hours.
Oct 2025
Serverless Personality Analyzer @ AWS Cloud Day Türkiye
Community Lounge talk with Eren Direk. We shared how we built a serverless personality analyzer that reads Spotify playlists. Crowd was full of questions.
Jun 2025
Game Dev Workshop with Amazon Q Developer
Hands-on workshop at İstanbul Bilişim Zirvesi with Eren Direk, co-organised by 8 student clubs. Helped people with no coding background ship their first game.
May 2023
First Big Cybersecurity Conference @ Kartal AL
Founder talk while running the high-school Informatics Club. Live hacking demo with Ömer Çıtak and Yiğit Duman.
06 · contact
Get in touch.
Speaking, writing collabs, mentoring, or just a chat. I read every email.