CoreX

Cloud Platform Engineering

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

From landing zones and network topology to multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters and compliance guardrails, I design and operate the kind of infrastructure that a growing engineering organisation can actually rely on.

I’ve built platforms on all three major clouds — Azure (where I’ve done extensive Landing Zone work with Terraform and Azure Policies), AWS (EKS, networking, IAM), and GCP (GKE, embedding with Google PSO). The result is always the same: a platform your developers can consume confidently, with clear standards for security, observability, and delivery baked in from day one.

Infrastructure as Code

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Manual infrastructure processes are slow, error-prone, and impossible to audit. I replace them with Terraform modules and Ansible playbooks your team can understand, own, and extend without calling me every time something changes.

Every resource is versioned, every change is reviewed, every environment is reproducible. When something breaks at 2 a.m., your runbook is the code itself — not someone’s memory.

CI/CD Pipeline Design

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Most CI/CD problems are not tool problems — they’re architecture problems. Each team invents its own pipeline, quality gates are inconsistent, and every microservice has a slightly different way of doing the same thing.

I design composable pipeline systems where the shared logic lives in templates your teams consume with minimal configuration. Security scans, container builds, environment promotions, rollback logic — all consistent, all auditable, none duplicated. The pattern scales whether you have 5 services or 500.

Technical Leadership & Team Coaching

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Engineering excellence doesn’t happen by accident. I work alongside your team rather than above it — conducting architecture reviews, running hands-on workshops, and building the habits that compound over time.

I’ve led teams of senior engineers through platform migrations, run many learning sessions on Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Azure at meetups, conferences and on-site at customers’. I have also coached individuals across multiple projects. The goal is always the same: leave the team stronger than I found it, so they don’t need me to stay.

IoT Prototyping

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been building IoT projects in my spare time for years — Home Assistant integrations, ESP8266 and ESP32 sensors, MQTT pipelines, Prometheus and Grafana dashboards driven by real physical data.

At a hackathon, a friend and I built a snow-depth detector using an ultrasonic sensor and an ESP32 shipping metrics over MQTT. The organisers (84codes) hired me to turn this prototype into a hardware demo kit that connected DHT11 sensors to LavinMQ queues, with a Ruby backend forwarding to Grafana — specifically to make conference workshops tangible.

Technology Exploration

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Every engineering organisation reaches a point where someone needs to actually try the new thing before the team commits to it. That evaluation takes time and focus your team doesn’t have.

I embed with your team as a technical researcher: I evaluate candidate technologies, build proof-of-concepts, stress-test architectural directions, and produce a clear recommendation backed by real evidence — not vendor slides. The engagement ends with a decision, not a shrug.

Portable Pipelines

Thu, 21 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Every microservices team eventually reinvents the same pipeline. They copy and paste the YAML from the last service they built, change the image name, and call it done. For a while, it works fine.

Then a security vulnerability surfaces and you need to add a container scan step to every pipeline. Or you want to enforce a consistent artifact naming scheme. Or someone needs to change how environment variables are injected. Suddenly you’re touching 30 pipelines individually, hoping you get them all — and hoping they’re consistent enough to actually find.

The future is now: join the DevOps revolution!

Wed, 15 Nov 2017 12:00:00 +0200

The software industry has been through a lot of change. The way we build, test, and deliver software has evolved dramatically — and it’s still evolving.

In this talk I trace that evolution: where we came from, where we are today, and where the real opportunities are for teams that want to move faster without breaking things. The DevOps revolution isn’t about tools — it’s about removing the friction between the people who build software and the people who operate it.

Introducción a los Schedulers

Sat, 25 Mar 2017 15:54:45 +0200

La coordinación manual de recursos es un proceso lento y propenso a fallos. El mercado ofrece diferentes tecnologías para resolver este problema — pero ¿cuál escoger? ¿por qué?

En esta charla hago una introducción a los principales sistemas de coordinación de recursos disponibles: Kubernetes, Mesos, Docker Swarm y Nomad. El objetivo es que el público salga con suficiente contexto para tomar una decisión informada.

From development to production in 5 minutes: is your company ready?

Thu, 17 Nov 2016 15:31:38 +0200

Companies want change. They say they want to adopt agile methodologies, DevOps, containers, and orchestrators. But wanting change and being ready for it are two different things.

In this talk, by drawing a parallel with the history of South American independence, I help people at every level of an organisation understand the real challenges — technical and cultural — of driving transformation in large companies. And what actually works.

Microservices infrastructure with Terraform, Consul and Vault

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 15:31:38 +0200

Together with Container Solutions and Cisco, we built a robust infrastructure specialised in the delivery of microservices. Three key components made it work:

Terraform for building and managing the infrastructure
Consul for service discovery
Vault for secrets management

In this talk I walk through the product we built, the decisions we made, and how the three tools glue together into something coherent.

Writing your own Terraform provider

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 15:10:47 +0200

While working with a client at Container Solutions, I had the opportunity to introduce Terraform to one of their critical infrastructure processes — turning a deliverable that normally took two weeks into a 30-minute Terraform run. Along the way, I wrote two custom Terraform providers.

This talk, preceded by a blog post, walks through why you’d write your own provider and exactly how to build one: the structure, the SDK, the provider schema, and the resource lifecycle.

Defining your infrastructure with code

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 15:10:47 +0200

A short introduction to Terraform — what it is, how it works, and why defining your infrastructure as code changes the way you think about operations.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m an independent IT consultant. I’ve delivered enterprise systems since 2008. Most of that time has gone into building the things that make other engineers’ lives easier.

I started as a web developer in 2009 — ASP.NET, then Ruby on Rails, then the full frontend parade: jQuery, Backbone.js, Ember.js, Angular. After a few years of that, I made the leap to infrastructure and never looked back.

The evolution

Once I discovered automation, there was no going back. Ansible for configuration management. Terraform for cloud infrastructure. Docker when it was still a curiosity. Kubernetes before it was boring. I’ve worked with EKS, AKS, and GKE, and across all three major cloud providers — Azure, AWS, and GCP — as well as smaller ones like DigitalOcean, Scaleway, Linode, and Hetzner.

Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Have a project in mind, or just want to talk through a problem?

The best way to reach me is by email at carlos@corex.co, or fill in the form below and I’ll get back to you within one business day.

CV

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Tech Lead / Cloud & Platform Engineer

carlos@corex.co · LinkedIn · GitHub · Talks

Summary

Tech lead since 2008, designing, building, and operating cloud-native platforms and leading engineering teams by example. I specialise in turning manual, error-prone infrastructure processes into fully automated, secure, and compliant systems — from landing zones and reusable CI/CD pipelines to multi-tenant Kubernetes architectures. I teach, coach, and share knowledge as a core part of how I raise the bar for the teams I work with, both internally and through public speaking at conferences and meetups.