Dave Rix

Senior AWS Cloud Architect, Platform Engineer and MySQL/Aurora DBA. 30+ years building infrastructure that has to stay up.

I architect multi-region AWS platforms, automate them end to end with Terraform, Ansible and Jenkins, and run MySQL and Aurora at scale – including large global Aurora fleets and significant cloud-cost reductions. Lately I weave AI-assisted and agentic coding through the daily workflow, and run a multi-agent organisation on my own hardware.

Selected work

Annotated case studies – the problem, the architecture, the decisions, and what happened. (Case studies in progress.)

Multi-region AWS platform, regulated iGaming

A compliant multi-region platform spanning European and US jurisdictions – data-residency controls, VPC isolation for GDPR, and PCI-DSS payment infrastructure.

Environment on Demand

A self-service platform engineering system using Jenkins to orchestrate Terraform and Ansible, giving developers automated build-and-destroy infrastructure with full lifecycle management.

Aurora fleet optimisation

Managed and optimised a large global Aurora MySQL fleet (60+ clusters across regions), roughly halving cost while holding a four-nines availability target.

Building with AI

AI is part of how I work, not a separate hat. Daily Claude Code, GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT across Terraform, Bash and Python – including a substantial Claude Code-driven modernisation of an existing Terraform and AWS estate (component upgrades, WordPress 6 to 7, Amazon Linux 2 to 2023, PHP 7 to 8.3). I also run a multi-agent organisation of 30+ CrewAI agents in Multipass, applying the same production discipline to AI that I bring to infrastructure. OpenClaw is an experimental track I intend to build out further.

What I work with

AWS · Terraform · Ansible · Jenkins · GitHub Actions
MySQL · Aurora · MariaDB · PostgreSQL · ProxySQL
Claude Code · Copilot · CrewAI · OpenClaw · Docker · EKS · Multipass

Available for work

Senior architecture and DBA contracts, Outside-IR35, through Analysis by Design Ltd.
Remote or hybrid, UK and EU. Selective advisory and part-time engagements considered.
5x AWS certified, HashiCorp Terraform Associate, SC/DV eligible.