About
Posted 17 Aug 2026
Hi, I'm Marnix van Valen. I'm a cloud architect and consultant at Zure, helping organizations build SaaS products in cloud and hybrid environments. I've been building software professionally for more than 25 years, across a wide field of applications — from industrial control systems to web applications and cloud platforms.
My work has gradually shifted from building applications to the architecture and the platforms underneath them: cloud architecture, platform engineering, and most recently agentic engineering.
In 2007 I started my own company, Alanta, and built web sites, customer portals, high-quality online digital printing solutions and web-based business information and collaboration applications. That's where a lot of what I know comes from: I've seen technologies come and go, and learned which ideas tend to last.
What I bring
I design cloud platforms and I keep my hands in the code. Architecture that doesn't survive contact with an implementation isn't worth much, so I stay close to the work — Azure, .NET, containers, CI/CD, identity, security and observability.
Because I work across several teams rather than inside one, a lot of the job is people and the way they work. As a team lead I found that I really enjoy helping teams reach new levels of competency and happiness, by improving how they work as much as what they build. My core goal on any engagement is to make myself obsolete by the time it's done: the teams, the customer and their end users should be able to keep running the solution without me. Delivering a platform takes a broad set of skills — design, implementation, automated testing, deployment, infrastructure and support — and I don't shy away from any of them, because the quality of the whole is determined by the weakest link in the chain. That's what I stand for and that's what you get: quality and dedication all the way.
Sharing the knowledge
Sharing what I know is part of the job, not a side project. I regularly give workshops and training events, and I've given guest lectures as well.
This blog is the written half of that; a collection of solutions, case studies and guidance based on my everyday work, written down so that the next person to hit them, often future me, doesn't have to work them out again. I also try to give back to the open source projects I've enjoyed using.
Working together
I take on architecture and consulting engagements through Zure. Feel free to contact me on LinkedIn.