Trafex DevOps consultancy

I help software teams build, run and secure cloud platforms that scale.

From Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code to CI/CD, security hardening and AI-driven delivery: hands-on DevOps expertise with over 20 years of experience running production systems, focused on simple solutions to complex problems.

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Tim de Pater

Tim de Pater

Senior DevOps Architect

Trusted by teams at

  • NitMedia
  • Locationscout
  • iWebdevelopment

Services

What I can do for your team

DevOps supports the whole software delivery lifecycle, and increasingly that includes AI agents doing part of the work. These are the areas where I make the biggest difference, each backed by results delivered for clients.

AI-native software delivery

A delivery process in which AI agents do real work across the whole SDLC, from refined ticket to deployed change, with guardrails that raise quality instead of lowering it.

Results

  • Designed an AI software factory in which agents pick up refined tickets, write a spec, implement test-first and open a merge request for human review
  • Made codebases agent-ready with clear conventions, decision records and automated quality gates
  • Built MCP servers that give AI agents secure access to business systems
  • Set up a GitLab pipeline in which Claude Code reviews every new merge request

Platform & Kubernetes engineering

A Kubernetes platform your team can build on: scalable, self-healing and understandable, without the operational overhead.

Results

  • Built a scalable and resilient Kubernetes platform to host a SaaS application
  • Built scalable, self-healing Kubernetes clusters on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure
  • Containerised a legacy application and moved it onto Kubernetes
  • Resolved scaling issues in an existing Kubernetes cluster

Cloud infrastructure & cost control

Cloud infrastructure that is reproducible, reviewable and cost-aware, defined in code instead of clicked together.

Results

  • Built new cloud infrastructure from scratch with Infrastructure as Code
  • Migrated a manually configured AWS account to Terraform
  • Designed the move to multitenancy for an existing SaaS application
  • Reduced cloud costs by optimising serverless functions, right-sizing services to actual usage and reining in monitoring and logging costs

CI/CD & developer experience

Pipelines that give developers fast, reliable feedback and get changes to production safely and often.

Results

  • Designed CI/CD pipelines in GitLab and GitHub that deploy a review environment per Git branch on Kubernetes
  • Introduced SAST scanning in the CI/CD pipeline
  • Added container vulnerability scanning to the CI/CD pipeline

Security & compliance

Cloud environments that hold up in a security review, with least privilege, controlled network traffic and findings followed up instead of ignored.

Results

  • Brought a cloud environment in line with the CIS security benchmark, with least privilege and structured follow-up of security findings
  • Locked down network traffic, including outbound traffic, and set up Web Application Firewalls on Google Cloud and Kubernetes
  • Set up encryption with customer-managed keys to meet compliance requirements
  • Hardened a web application with the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard and advised on GDPR compliance

Reliability & performance

Systems that stay fast and observable under load, with problems found at the root instead of patched over.

Results

  • Improved MySQL performance by applying partitioning
  • Added a caching layer that sped up a web application
  • Set up monitoring, centralised logging and application performance monitoring to find the root cause of long-running issues
  • Tracked down a memory leak in a production application

Testimonials

What clients say

“Tim is a brilliant and gifted DevOps Engineer. I had the pleasure of working with him on many clients during our partnership at NitMedia. We worked together for about two years on upward of 20+ projects and Tim was crucial in architecture and execution. What really makes Tim stand out is his ability to problem solve and come up with simple but elegant solutions to any complex problems we faced. I was really impressed with his humility against the breath of knowledge he possessed, he is extremely kind. I hope to definitely continue to work with Tim on future projects.”

Nithin Meppurathu

President - NitMedia

“Tim is by far one of the best freelancers I have worked with. He is very experienced and focuses on solving problems without me having to ask about the current status because he just gets things done. On top, he is super friendly and simply a great person you definitely want to work with. Thank you for all your awesome support on Locationscout.net dear Tim, I highly appreciate it.”

Manuel Becker

Founder - Locationscout.net

“It's great to work alongside Tim for nearly four years now. In our journey together, Tim has been instrumental in enhancing our security measures, refining our development pipelines, and significantly improving scalability within our cloud environment. For anyone looking for a skilled professional who brings a mix of technical prowess and pro-active advice, I recommend Tim.”

Yannick van den Bergen

Owner - iWebdevelopment

Tools and expertise

Fluent in your stack

20+ years of building and operating production systems across cloud platforms, container orchestration and DevOps tooling. These are the tools used most.

Containers & orchestration
DockerKubernetesGKEAKSk3sTraefik
Cloud
AWSGoogle CloudAzureCloud RunCloud ArmorBigQuery
Infrastructure as Code & automation
TerraformAnsiblen8n
CI/CD
GitLab CIGitHub ActionsBitbucket PipelinesTrivy
Observability & testing
PrometheusGrafanaDatadogSentryElasticsearchk6
Databases
PostgreSQLMySQLMongoDB
Languages & frameworks
PHPLaravelTypeScriptNode.jsNext.js
AI
ClaudeClaude CodeClaude Agent SDKMCPOpenAIMistral

Articles

Latest articles

All articles

Implementing AI in your application

Four lessons learned from building an AI analyst feature into Metric Moose: use libraries, test automatically, store conversations and mind privacy.

Recurring processes eating your time? Besides consultancy, I also build workflow automation with n8n through Assistr.

Contact

Let's talk about your platform

Tell me about your challenge and you'll hear back from me within two working days.

consultancy@trafex.nl