10× deploy frequency, 38% lower cloud spend

A fast-growing fintech deployed manually and infrequently, the cloud bill was climbing, and a recent outage had shaken confidence. We introduced infrastructure as code, automated CI/CD with safe rollbacks, full observability, and a cost-optimization pass, plus an incident practice the team could own.

10×
Deploy frequency
38%
Lower cloud spend
4 min
Recovery time

What they came with

Releases went out once a month, by hand, from a runbook someone had to follow in the right order. Anything that missed the window waited for the next one, so fixes queued behind features and each release carried a larger change set than the one before it. On the infrastructure side, capacity was provisioned for the busiest hour of the month and paid for around the clock. There was no straightforward way to say what any single service was costing.

What the engagement covered

  • CI/CD with one-click rollback and safety checks
  • Infrastructure as code: reproducible and auditable
  • Observability, SLOs, and a real incident practice

Technical detail

The estate lives in Terraform

Every environment is defined as code and changes go through the same pull request and review path as application changes. Drift shows up as a plan diff before it is applied rather than as something discovered during an incident.

Blue-green with an automatic gate

The new version comes up alongside the current one and health and error-rate checks decide whether traffic is promoted. Rollback is a traffic switch back to a stack that is still running, not a rebuild and redeploy under pressure.

Build once, promote the artefact

GitHub Actions builds a single image per commit and the same digest is promoted through environments. Nothing is rebuilt between staging and production, so what passed the gate is exactly what runs.

Autoscaling sized from observed load

Requests and limits were set from measured usage rather than the old provisioned ceiling, with horizontal scaling on top and budget alerts per environment. Capacity follows load down out of hours instead of sitting at peak around the clock.

The stack

Infrastructure

AWSTerraformKubernetesDocker

CI/CD

GitHub ActionsAmazon ECR

Observability

PrometheusGrafanaCloudWatchAWS Budgets
Practice
Cloud & Reliability
Sector
FinTech
Shape
Client engagement
Stack
Terraform, Kubernetes, Datadog
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