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

Case studies and technical write-ups – the problem, the architecture, the decisions, and what happened.

Case study: Modernising an AWS estate with Claude Code

Modernising a production AWS estate with Claude Code – migrating Terraform state v3 to v4, the AWS provider to 6.0, and Amazon Linux, PHP and WordPress to current versions – with an honest account of where the AI tool helped and where it did not.

Recent posts

  • Amazon Athena SQL Cheat Sheet

    A practical Amazon Athena SQL cheat sheet: partition projection, CTAS, JSON, window functions, and the cost and quoting gotchas that bite in Trino engine v3.

  • Vibe-coding AnalyseMy.Golf: a series

    Over twenty years of intermittent effort — from VBA macros and an Access database built for The Cygnet Golf Society in 2002, through two abandoned Laravel attempts, to a full Laravel 13 SaaS using Claude Code throughout. This is the series index.

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.