About

I'm Gerhard van Deventer, a data and solution architect with over two decades designing, building, and optimising cloud data platforms across AWS, Azure, and GCP. I help organisations get their data AI-ready — establishing the architecture, governance, and quality foundations that modern AI and LLM tooling depend on — and I guide engineering teams in adopting AI-assisted workflows (including Claude) pragmatically, rather than chasing hype.

I have hands-on early-LLM delivery experience, including building a child labour index with large language models, and my focus is translating business needs into scalable, maintainable, cost-efficient data architectures — then enabling the teams who run them to work smarter.

Most recently I've been working with Equal Experts, a UK consultancy, on solution architecture and lead data engineering for multi-cloud data platforms. Before that: OUTsurance, Ellmount Group in Stockholm, and twelve-plus years growing from database administrator to technical lead.

Core competencies

AI enablement & data readiness

AI-readiness assessment, data foundations for LLMs, Claude adoption & team enablement, prompt engineering, AI-assisted dev workflows

Architecture

Solution architecture, cloud data platform design & migration, data warehouse modernisation, C4 modelling, decentralised architectural decision-making

Cloud & data platforms

AWS, Azure, GCP (multi-cloud), Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery

Engineering

Spark, SQL, Python, ETL/ELT optimisation, dbt, Airflow / Cloud Composer, Terraform, CI/CD, GitLab

Governance & quality

Data governance, data quality, cost & performance optimisation, VPC Service Controls

This site is the canonical home for everything I write — every post goes up here first, before it syndicates to the newsletter or anywhere else. You can follow along via RSS, browse thefull archive, or find me onLinkedIn.