# About

> Platform engineer whose platform is data infrastructure — the career arc and point of view behind cloudplz.cc.

---

LLMS index: [llms.txt](/llms.txt)

---

I'm cloudplz — principal cloud infrastructure engineer. Eighteen years across
cloud, infrastructure as code, and database platforms. The domain is data
infrastructure; the discipline is platform engineering. Everything here is
written from production, not from documentation.

## The arc

I started in database operations: MySQL backups, replication, capacity
planning, 3 AM pages. Then Vitess, when horizontal scaling in MySQL meant
running a distributed system yourself — three years of production operations
that taught me what the sharding tax actually costs.

When the org moved to AWS, I led database migrations: about fifty production
databases to Aurora over two years, most cutovers under three minutes of
downtime, including multi-terabyte tier-0 systems with 24/7 write traffic.
Along the way: Aurora Global Database with cross-region replication lag cut
from seconds to ~70ms, and SOC2 audits that came back with no findings.

Then the shift from operating infrastructure to building products out of it.
That's where the interesting problems turned out to live.

## What I've built

- **No-code infrastructure platform** — product teams provision
  production-ready Aurora clusters through Backstage templates without
  writing Terraform. Roughly 80–95% faster than the ticket queue it
  replaced, an estimated 3,000+ engineering hours a year given back.
- **Terraform module ecosystem** — curated modules with 8,000+ usages across
  70+ repositories. The compliant, production-hardened way is also the
  easiest way.
- **Database canary applications** — customer-zero validation across seven
  data technologies, so platform changes break in the canary, not in a
  customer's incident channel.
- **AI-enhanced infrastructure tooling** — RAG, MCP, and LLM-agent workflows
  applied to infrastructure operations. Agents are infrastructure; I
  provision them like it.

The through-line: infrastructure that works without me. When teams can
provision what they need without asking, the platform team finally has time
to improve the platform.

## What I write about

The platform layer that hundreds of engineers build on: Aurora and Vitess
scaling decisions, Terraform module design, self-service infrastructure,
and what breaks when these meet production. Written for people building
platforms, not spinning up their first database.

If a post would make sense on the AWS blog without the platform
perspective, it doesn't belong here.

---

*Built on Hugo with the [oink](https://github.com/pgsty/oink) theme. Find me
on [GitHub](https://github.com/cloudplz).*