About
20 years of production AWS, since EC2 beta.
I'm David Plappert. I've been building on AWS since EC2 was in beta in 2006. That makes me part of the original cloud cohort — a few thousand engineers worldwide who watched AWS grow from a curiosity into the platform that runs half the internet.
For the last decade, my focus has been production reliability of revenue-bearing AWS systems. Healthcare exchanges processing $500M+/year. Fortune 100 vendor contracts in the eight figures. Streaming platforms with 99.9% uptime expectations. The work where downtime has measurable dollar consequences.
Credentials
- US Patent 11,146,689 — Cloud architecture, issued October 12, 2021
- AWS City on a Cloud Award (2016) — Best Practices Award for DC Health Link, where IdeaCrew led the engineering
- AWS City on a Cloud Award (2018) — IdeaCrew's open-source cloud technology recognized for the second time
- Principal Digital Architect — 10-year title at IdeaCrew
- 20 years AWS — Since EC2 beta launch in 2006
- $500M+ per year — In production payments processed on AWS serverless
- $1M/month cloud budget — Managed across 12 AWS and 3 Azure accounts
Career
Lead Cloud Engineer / AWS Reliability Lead
TEKsystems · Sept 2025 – Present · Remote
Sole senior technical resource for an eight-figure Fortune 100 vendor relationship. Sole 24x7 on-call for production AWS. Cross-team senior escalation across two engineering teams. Architecture for ~30 downstream consumer systems.
DevOps Team Lead
IdeaCrew · 2015 – 2025 · Remote
Led 7-member engineering team managing $1M/month AWS+Azure budget across 12 AWS accounts and 3 Azure accounts. Architected and operated production AWS systems processing $500M+ per year in healthcare insurance payments for state-based exchanges including DCHBX, Massachusetts Health Connector, CoverME, and DC Department of Behavioral Health. Earned AWS City on a Cloud awards in 2016 and 2018.
Senior Cloud Engineer
PBS · 2014
Built and managed AWS-based RTMP video streaming platform with 99.9% uptime. Implemented adaptive bandwidth modulation, increasing viewer watch time by 158%. Managed two-person development team.
Senior Cloud Architect
Argonne National Laboratory · 2013
Designed and implemented PHP web application for federal grant applications. Streamlined grant workflows, driving 283% increase in revenue.
Senior Cloud DevOps
Best Buy · 2012
Led migration from on-premises to AWS across enterprise teams including BestBuy.com, POS, and New Product Ingestion. Reduced infrastructure costs by over 50%. Led 6-member DevOps engineering team.
Why fractional
I work fractional because the companies whose AWS production is most critical rarely need a full-time senior AWS architect, but they urgently need the role to exist. A ten-to-twenty-hour weekly fractional engagement at the senior level delivers more value than a junior full-time hire — especially for vendor-shipped infrastructure, production reliability, and cost optimization work.
If that sounds like the gap on your team, let's talk.