Dipak Rijal · Auckland NZ

AWS RDS & Aurora
Consultant NZ

Senior consulting for Amazon RDS and Aurora PostgreSQL when production reliability, migration design, failover behaviour, performance, cost and support runbooks need experienced database judgement.

Available immediately for contract & partner subcontracting · Auckland / Remote ANZ

Send the database problem →View case studies →

NZ-based senior specialistAuckland presence, ANZ remote delivery.

Oracle + PostgreSQL depthOCM background with AWS database focus.

Production-first deliveryAssessment, change control, rollback and runbooks.

Partner friendlyContracting, subcontracting and advisory support.

When to call me

Architecture

You need confidence before production

Review RDS/Aurora topology, failover path, backup/restore, parameter groups, connection pooling and operational ownership before changes go live.

Design review
HA/DR posture
Runbook gaps

Performance

Aurora or RDS is not behaving as expected

Investigate latency, waits, replica lag, storage/I/O, autovacuum, connection pressure and parameter choices in the managed-database context.

Performance Insights
Query and engine review
Rollback-safe fixes

Migration

You are moving into or between AWS databases

Plan source assessment, DMS approach, validation, cutover and post-migration hardening for Aurora/RDS targets.

DMS/SCT strategy
Validation checkpoints
Cutover readiness

What I check first

Reliability

Recovery and failover

Multi-AZ design, backup policy, restore testing, snapshot strategy, replication posture and incident response readiness.

RTO/RPO thinking
Restore validation
Failover runbook

Operations

Monitoring and ownership

Performance Insights, CloudWatch, logs, alerts, runbooks, IAM posture and whether the team can diagnose the common failure modes.

Observability
Access model
Operational handover

Cost

Right-size without hiding the problem

Instance class, storage type, GP2/GP3 considerations, reserved capacity assumptions and whether tuning can avoid unnecessary scaling.

Cost signals
Capacity planning
FinOps recommendations

Typical deliverables

Review outputs

RDS/Aurora architecture findings
Prioritised risk register
Performance and cost recommendations
HA/DR improvement plan

Implementation support

Parameter or topology change plan
Migration/cutover support
Incident RCA and remediation
Runbook and dashboard recommendations

Stakeholder value

Plain-English summary
Decision-ready options
Risk and trade-off explanation
Handover to internal or partner teams

Engagement model

Available as a fixed-scope architecture review, migration readiness assessment, performance sprint or contract/subcontracting support for AWS and consulting partners.

What good RDS/Aurora support should leave behind

A clearer operating model

Your team should know what to monitor, what normal looks like, which alarms matter, and who owns each recovery step during an incident.

Confidence in resilience

Backup, restore and failover assumptions need validation. The output should make recovery expectations easier to defend to leadership and auditors.

Practical cost control

Cost advice should separate unavoidable capacity from waste caused by query issues, storage behaviour, instance choice or missing operational visibility.