Cloud Platform Architecture
Production-grade AWS and Azure environments: VPCs, multi-AZ clusters, infrastructure-as-code with Terraform and Pulumi. Designed to scale with your business and your team.
Architecture · Security · Strategy
I architect the platforms your team depends on, and I can take them from blueprint to production.
Strategic cloud architecture, platform engineering, and security consulting for organizations that need expert guidance on the decisions that matter most, with hands-on depth when the situation calls for it.
AWS Certified CompTIA Security+ Arch Linux Maintainer 20+ Years in Technology DoD Compliant
What I Do
The right architecture, guided by experience.
I help you make the decisions that shape your platform's future, then stay as close to the work as you need me to.
Kubernetes & Containers
EKS cluster design, Helm and Kustomize configurations, service meshes with mTLS, autoscaling with Karpenter — architecture decisions that keep Kubernetes working for you, not against you.
DevSecOps & CI/CD
Automated build, test, and deploy pipelines that ship code faster without compromising security. GitOps workflows with Flux, GitHub Actions, and Gitlab CI. Designed once, maintained easily.
Security & Compliance
NIST 800-53, NIST 800-171, DoD SRG compliance. SIEM/XDR deployment, red team assessments, Zero Trust architecture, and vulnerability management programs.
Monitoring & Observability
Centralized monitoring stacks: Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo, ClickHouse, Fluent Bit. Configured for high availability with actionable alerting and zero blind spots.
Results
Numbers that tell the story.
A few outcomes from recent engagements.
12x
Faster Builds
Architected the migration of a major platform's build system from single-instance runners to a multi-AZ EKS cluster with just-in-time AWS EC2 Spot provisioning. Compilation times dropped from roughly 12 hours to under 60 minutes. The cluster scales from a single-digit set of baseline nodes to 100+ nodes in under six minutes.
EKS Karpenter EC2 Spot GitLab CI
34%
Cost Reduction
Led discovery and implementation of cost optimization across a developer platform's AWS footprint: right-sizing instances, Spot utilization, Savings Plans adoption, scheduling configurations, and architectural improvements cutting monthly spend by more than a third.
AWS EC2 Savings Plans Cost Explorer Karpenter
24x
Platform Growth
Architected and evolved a developer platform from under 1,000 users to over 24,000: a trajectory of sustained, linear growth over five years. Efforts included Sidekiq tuning, Git client performance optimization, horizontal scaling, database tuning, and network throughput improvements via kernel tuning. All with minimal to zero downtime.
EKS Nginx ELB S3 Distributed Systems Linux
About
Two decades of building what matters.
I'm Andrew, a cloud architecture and security consultant based in Charlotte, North Carolina. I help organizations make the right decisions about the platforms their teams and products depend on, and I stay as hands-on as the engagement needs me to be.
I've been writing code since I was fourteen. My first real project was a computer vision system that could detect colors and execute actions in a game client, which led to an undergraduate independent study in near real-time pedestrian detection from a moving vehicle with a single camera. That early obsession with making computers do hard things well has shaped everything since.
My career has spanned startups, enterprise, research, and defense. I've built rendering infrastructure at Adobe for Behance and Portfolio, developed research platforms at NC State and RTI International, and spent the last six years leading platform architecture for a large-scale DoD developer environment, scaling it from under a thousand users to tens of thousands across a NIST-compliant, multi-cluster infrastructure.
I also founded Terra Robotics, where I developed drone technologies for automated soil analysis in agriculture and forestry. And when I'm not doing client work, I maintain packages in Arch Linux including firefox-developer-edition, docker-compose, and valkey.
I studied Computer Science at RIT with a concentration in Philosophy, which is a roundabout way of saying I care as much about why we build things as how.
Open Source
Arch Linux package maintainer of firefox-developer-edition, docker-compose, valkey, pulumi, trivy, and more in the [extra] repository.
Published Research
Contributor to "Dug: a semantic search engine" — published in NCBI Bioinformatics, 2022. Built analytic systems at NC State's Laboratory for Analytic Sciences.
Conference Speaker
Regular speaker at DoD-adjacent technology conferences (2019–2025). Guest appearances discussing developer platform architecture and ecosystem development.
Certifications
AWS Certified Developer – Associate. AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner. CompTIA Security+.
Get Started
Let's build something that lasts.
I'd love to hear about what you're working on. Book a free 30-minute consultation and let's see if we're the right fit. No pressure, no pitch, just an honest conversation about your needs.
There's an old saying in project management: good, fast, cheap. Pick two. I'm selective about the work I take on. When I commit, you get undivided focus and zero compromise on quality. Every engagement is built to create measurable value: faster timelines, lower costs, and infrastructure built to outlast the engagement itself.
I typically work on retained engagements ranging from three months to a year or more, shaped entirely around the complexity and needs of your project. If we're a fit, I'll walk you through exactly what that looks like.