David Plappert
Principal Cloud Architect · AWS Consultant
Shipped AI for CI/CD & Apps
Available for consulting & contract engagements — AWS architecture review, Well-Architected reliability, vendor platform oversight, and AI-augmented engineering
since EC2 beta
cloud architecture
Consulting Services
Senior AWS depth, delivered as focused engagements. Every service below is something I do in production today — not a practice area on a slide.
AWS Architecture Review & Well-Architected Assessment
Independent, senior-level review of your AWS architecture against the Well-Architected Framework — reliability, security, cost, and operational excellence — with a prioritized, actionable findings report.
Vendor Platform Oversight (Buy-Side Review)
Paying a vendor seven or eight figures for a platform? I review every vendor-shipped release (CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform) before it reaches your production — the same gatekeeping I perform today for a Fortune 50 manufacturer's revenue-critical platform.
Reliability & Observability Engineering
Load testing strategy, monitoring and alerting design, high-availability and disaster-recovery architecture for revenue-bearing AWS systems — built by someone who has been the final escalation point for a decade.
Cloud Migration Strategy
On-premises to AWS, monolith to microservices, or platform to platform. I led the fastest state-based health exchange transition off the federal FedHub on record, and Best Buy’s billion-dollar e-commerce systems onto AWS.
AI-Augmented Engineering Enablement
I run agentic AI in production today — Claude Code workflows that deploy, dry-run, detect bugs, and file tickets through custom MCP integrations. I can build the same leverage, with governance, into your engineering organization.
Fractional Principal Cloud Architect
Ongoing senior architecture leadership on a retainer basis — roadmap, design reviews, vendor management, and mentoring for teams that need principal-level AWS depth without a full-time hire.
Why teams hire me
I have run production workloads on Amazon Web Services for 19 years — since the EC2 beta. I hold US Patent 11,146,689 for cloud architecture, and the DevOps team I led won the AWS City on a Cloud Award twice (2016, 2018) for the DC Health Benefit Exchange architecture I owned.
Today I am the sole client-side AWS authority for a Fortune 50 manufacturer's revenue-critical platform — independently reviewing every vendor-shipped AWS CDK release before it reaches production and providing technical oversight of an eight-figure vendor relationship. Before that, I spent a decade as a client-facing principal architect at a government health-tech consultancy, where architecture I scoped and delivered grew engagements by $1M and $2M per year, payment workflows I designed processed $500M+ annually under HIPAA, SOC 2, and IRS Publication 1075, and I advised 18F (GSA) on state health-exchange replication.
The through-line of my career is reliability for systems where downtime is measured in dollars per minute — from Best Buy's e-commerce infrastructure on Thanksgiving Day (25% of all US e-commerce traffic, one engineer on site: me) to a real-time 3D commerce platform earning $3,000 a minute. And I pair that with modern leverage: I ship agentic AI engineering in production — Claude Code workflows that deploy, test, detect bugs, and file tickets through custom MCP integrations I wrote.
Based in Peoria, Illinois · Remote-first, US-wide · Schedule a call