I’m David Galiata, a security engineer in the Bay Area.
I write about securing cloud and AI systems and building security that accelerates innovation.
Director, Security Engineering @ Aquia. CISSP, CCSP, CISM.
Recent Posts
All posts- 9 min read
The patterns behind infrastructure as code, and how Terraform implements them
The handful of problems every IaC tool has to solve, the way Terraform solves each one, and the newer features worth knowing about.
- 5 min read
GitHub Actions vs GitLab CI vs CircleCI: Jobs, Steps, and Stages Explained
GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and CircleCI use different names for the same ideas. Here's the shared model underneath, and how to translate between them.
- 5 min read
Building MSP Insights: Learning Full-Stack Dev by Securing an LLM Feature
A hands-on project for learning React, FastAPI, and how to guard an LLM feature against prompt injection.
- 4 min read
Workflow or Agent? Choosing the Right AI Architecture
A practical breakdown of the difference between AI workflows and agents, with examples from IT consulting.
- 3 min read
RAG vs MCP: They're Not the Same Thing
Two of the most confused terms in AI explored.
Selected Projects
All projects- FastAPIReact
RiskForge
A web-based risk register for NIST SP 800-53, NIST AI RMF 1.0, and the OWASP GenAI LLM Top 10, with a 5x5 risk matrix, control mapping, dashboards, and CSV reporting.
- AstroReact
STRIDE Threat Modeling Tool
An interactive web app for conducting STRIDE threat analysis, with automatic risk scoring, visual analytics, and exportable HTML/CSV/JSON reports.
- PythonAWS
Driftwatch
A CLI tool that catches infrastructure drift between live AWS environments and Terraform code, with pre-deploy conflict checks, drift detection, and full infra scans exported to JSON, Excel, and Mermaid diagrams.