The Option to Abandon

Running infrastructure that can't afford to break, and helping companies own theirs.

15 years across content delivery, edge & regulated data. 8 Tbps of bare-metal CDN at Optus Sport through the English Premier League, EURO 2020, the FIFA Women's World Cup 2023 and EURO 2024. Before that, the privacy-preserving linkage behind NSW Health Lumos, which has since scaled to 7M+ patients and 200M+ linked records, still shipping five years later.

What has to work

Owning your infrastructure no longer means going off to build a new one. It means getting the keys back: the contract, the bill, the agentic workflows nobody is reviewing.

I have run systems where a EURO final finished at 7am on a Monday, with a national audience watching on phones mid-commute and nowhere else to go if the stream broke.

Experience

Twenty years of delivery, fifteen of them running infrastructure where failure is the news rather than a ticket. Scale opens the door. What gets checked after that is whether the thing outlived the people who built it.

2026 to present

Elijah Glover. Principal Engineer.

Cloud bills read against the architecture that produced them, CDN configuration reviewed with the contract, agents in production given a perimeter, edge security, and sell-side diligence when the work is a sale.

2021 to 2026

Optus Sport. Principal CDN Engineer.

8 Tbps of bare-metal CDN carrying live sport to a national audience at 99.95% uptime, roughly 2 EB delivered at fifty cents a terabyte, and five years without an exploited vulnerability.

2017 to 2021

NSW Health Lumos. Lead Engineer.

Australia's first statewide linked primary care data program. The architecture handed over has grown to 934 practices, 7M+ patients and 200M+ linked records, still shipping five years later.

2015 to 2016

section.io. Principal Engineer.

The developer-first CDN that beat household-name incumbents head-to-head, five years before edge compute became consensus. Australian origins to a Boulder HQ and the Webscale acquisition.

2005 to 2015

Enterprise .NET delivery.

A decade shipping for Australia's largest brands: Westpac's first hybrid mobile banking platform, Cancer Institute NSW, The Wiggles' first OTT product, and Servcorp across 21 countries.

Experience in detail   ›

Writing

Essays on what I have built, what I have seen, and what I think happens next.

The Option to Abandon

An agent is the most confident refiner ever built, and refinement is not invention. Real invention means walking away from something that works, and whether your organisation can afford that walk is set in infrastructure nobody thinks of as a decision. The tools are now the same for everyone. What they let you do is not.

25th August 2026 · 11 min read

The Audit Is Already Scheduled

A breach notice by SMS and a ministerial reply about the largest education breach on record, inside the same month, and neither contains a sentence the recipient can verify: the party that knows what was taken is never the one writing to you. An audit is not a badge you receive; it is a question you put to your own systems. If your customers' data sits in stacks you rent, the involuntary version is already scheduled.

28th July 2026 · 14 min read

Bytes Don't Pay The Rent

Five years inside the CDN buy. Premium live is where the per-GB question runs out. The serious end of streaming already built their own capacity. Here's what the bill is telling everyone else.

1st June 2026 · 7 min read

More writing   ›

Connect

Based in South East Queensland.

Tell me what you run. Email opens and gets read, and warm introductions are welcome.