Welcome. My name is Valtteri Kinnunen. :)
I am a Cloud, HPC, and Platform Architect. My work sits at the intersection of high-performance computing, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), and the complex infrastructure that powers modern software. I’ve spent my career navigating the challenges of scale—from designing resilient clusters to architecting event-driven systems that need to handle massive throughput.
I’m starting this blog to think in public about the systems I build and the problems I solve.
Why I’m Writing This
In our industry, it’s easy to get caught up in the “how” of specific tools—how to configure Kubernetes, how to deploy a Lambda function, how to set up a CI/CD pipeline. These are important, but I’m far more interested in the “why” and the “what if.”
I am interested in how complex systems are designed, how they operate under pressure, and how they evolve over time. I want to explore the convergence of traditional HPC and modern cloud paradigms, the nuance of API design, and the discipline of platform engineering.
This blog is a place for me to capture those thoughts. It’s a space to distill experience into observations that might be useful to others facing similar architectural challenges.
What to Expect
I plan to write about the intersection of infrastructure and software architecture. You can expect posts on:
- Cloud & HPC Convergence: How the lines between supercomputing and cloud computing are blurring, and what that means for platform design.
- API Strategy: Moving beyond REST vs. GraphQL debates to discuss API-first thinking and the role of interfaces in system decoupling.
- Event-Driven Systems: The realities of loose coupling, schema evolution, and the trade-offs involved in asynchronous architectures.
- Systems Thinking: The broader philosophy of building reliable, maintainable, and observable platforms.
- Compliance: Navigating the regulatory landscape and building systems that are secure and compliant by design.
I’m not here to sell you a product or convince you to use a specific framework. My goal is to share a perspective—one grounded in the reality of building and running large-scale systems.
Who This Is For
If you are an engineer, architect, or technical leader who cares about the machinery behind the code, this blog is for you. Whether you are managing on-premise clusters or designing cloud-native applications, I hope you’ll find something here that resonates or challenges your thinking.
Thank you for reading.