Neil Armitage is a Senior Database Reliability Engineer at Anaplan, where he deploys and maintains MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, and Pulsar clusters on Kubernetes at scale. His path to database infrastructure runs deep: over a three decades as a MySQL and Oracle DBA, including years at Continuent evaluating and deploying early Galera/Percona XtraDB Cluster implementations across multi-cloud environments, followed by roles spanning Skyscanner, VMware, and several DevOps leadership positions. He’s spent his career on the unglamorous but essential work of keeping production data infrastructure alive — and has the scar tissue from restores that didn’t go to plan to prove it.