Elias Brange
I'm Elias Brange, an AWS Cloud Consultant and AWS Community Builder in the Serverless category. I'm on a mission to drive Serverless adoption and help others on their Serverless AWS journey.
In 2024, I co-founded the Malmö office of Elva, a cloud consultancy firm that helps companies in the Nordics succeed on AWS.
My Journey
Containers galore
I began my cloud journey in the world of containers. At Lime Technologies, I migrated a monolithic, EC2-based solution to containerized microservices running on Docker Swarm. We managed everything ourselves: The infrastructure, boatloads of Terraform, ELK and TICK stacks, Consul, RabbitMQ, SQL Server, and the Python code running in the containers.
As you can imagine, the lion's share of the time was spent on making things work rather than building new features.
Managed services
I left the world of Docker Swarm behind. As I saw it, I had two options. Kubernetes or Fargate. Luckily, I chose Fargate. At Axis Communications, I built cloud services using the full suite of AWS managed services. ECS Fargate replaced Docker Swarm, Aurora replaced SQL Server, SQS and SNS replaced RabbitMQ, and CloudWatch replaced ELK and TICK.
I saw firsthand how managed services enabled us to focus on delivering business value rather than keeping the lights on.
Going Serverless
As our services at Axis grew, we became concerned about costs and scalability for some of them. This prompted me to experiment with Lambda and DynamoDB as a replacement for Fargate and Aurora. The experiment was successful, and I ended up migrating many of our services, further reducing the amount of time we had to spend on operational tasks.
Becoming a consultant
At the end of 2021, I decided to try my luck as a consultant after 5 years working at product companies. I became a cloud consultant at Tretton37. As one of the most experienced AWS engineers at the company, I was given the opportunity to serve as the AWS Competence Lead. In that role, I planned and hosted upskilling activities, such as interactive workshops, for my colleagues.
AWS Community Builder
I started writing on this blog more regularly at the end of 2021. In early 2022, I was made aware of something called the AWS Community Builder programme. This sounded interesting, so I applied. Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I could now call myself a community builder in the serverless category.
Building platforms
After a short stint as a consultant at Radio Sweden, I joined the platform team at Polestar. There, I had the chance to apply my learnings from using serverless at Axis and scale them across a larger organization. I helped teams move faster by equipping them with the tools, templates, and golden paths they needed to deliver at the pace the fast-moving business demanded.
At Polestar, I also used the entire CloudFlare platform at scale for the first time, having previously only used it for smaller/hobby projects. Oh boy. Their tech is nice, but using it as an enterprise is a nightmare.
Starting a business
At Polestar, I met some of the most brilliant colleagues I've ever worked with. As it turns out, they were also consultants, and I watched from the sidelines as they founded Elva. Their goal was to bring together the best AWS engineers in Sweden. They told me that they were looking to expand with a new office in my location, and I was sold. In early 2024, I co-founded the Malmö office together with my three co-founders.
Advisory
In 2024, I took on my first advisory role as a Principal Solutions Architect at Volvo Group Connected Solutions. At Volvo, they wanted to modernize their infrastructure and increase their use of managed services to free up time for innovation and reduce operational and maintenance burdens. I was brought in to bridge the gap between the platform teams and the developers.
I worked closely with development teams to get them started with the (for them) new technologies. Building on my experience in platform engineering at Polestar, I supported platform teams in identifying where development teams were most likely to get stuck and helped them remove those roadblocks to accelerate the whole organization.
Back to building
As of 2026, I'm back at Axis building products again. AWS? Check. Serverless? Check. TypeScript? Check.