How we take over a platform
Taking on an existing platform where deploys are manual and knowledge of the infrastructure sits with one person, and turning it into something the team can rely on.
The situation
A team with no dedicated infrastructure hire, where deploys were manual, took hours, and happened infrequently because they were painful enough to postpone. Infrastructure had been built by hand, so there was no clear record of what existed or why.
What we did
First, we documented the estate as it actually existed, and brought it under infrastructure as code so it could be reproduced and changed safely. Then we built automated deployment pipelines with tested rollback, and set up monitoring tuned to flag what actually needed attention rather than everything.
What changes for the team
- Deploys become routine and fast, rather than an event the team schedules around.
- Infrastructure changes are reviewed the same way code changes are, instead of made by hand in a console.
- Alerts are tuned so the team is notified about what matters, not everything.
- Operational knowledge lives in documentation and code, not in one person's memory.
Why this model, rather than a hire
A dedicated senior infrastructure hire is a meaningful commitment — a long search, and then one person's availability and knowledge as the single point of continuity. An ongoing engagement starts immediately and doesn't carry that single point of failure. When a team grows to the point where an in-house hire makes sense, we help make that hire and hand over cleanly — that's a good outcome, not a lost engagement.
- Terraform
- CI/CD
- AWS
- Observability
These describe our approach to each type of engagement, illustrated by the kind of situation and findings we see repeatedly. They are not attributed to a named client.