Monetizing a Legacy Product for a machine learning company
The company optimized a legacy business line to improve credit underwriting -- and Vynyl was there every step of the way.
COST OPTIMIZATIONSECURITYCONTINUOUS INTEGRATIONRAPID DEPLOYMENTMONITORINGLOGGINGADVANCED NETWORKINGAMAZON MANAGED KUBERNETES SERVICE (EKS)TERRAFORMAMAZON REDSHIFT
The Engagement
The codebase of the company’s legacy line of business was difficult to maintain and costly.
The infrastructure was not optimized or scalable. Features and data from different products were bound together. The product backlog was undefined. Ten years of historical data, disparate frameworks, language versions, and development patterns made this a big undertaking.
The company hired Vynyl to assess the product, re-engineer it, and at the same time maintain 24/7 uptime and real-time analytics for existing customers.
The Solution
Vynyl relied on its battle-tested knowledge of digital lending to modernize the codebase, architecture, and processes.
In the role of chief technology officer -- with a supporting crew of engineers, product managers, scrum masters, and Amazon Web Services specialists -- Vynyl identified and isolated the legacy components. The team upgraded the AWS infrastructure and rebuilt the software. Security improvements included an AWS Well-Architected multi-account model and hardware multi-factor authentication for root accounts. The upgrades addressed availability and scalability as well. To reduce costs, Vynyl analyzed the workload of the components, right-sized each one, and negotiated or canceled redundant services.
The Result
In a matter of months, we enabled the company to decouple this legacy product from its other product lines, so that it could invest resources in innovating new products.
The team resolved technical debt that accumulated over nine years of development. Vynyl met its quarterly deliverables and completed the project on time and on budget. The company trusted our team to take on the role of operations support for the company’s web-facing properties more quickly than planned. The lean Agile team was reduced from 12 people to six people, and tapered down to three people in maintenance mode until the product was sold.
The company achieved its goal to sell the product in a multimillion-dollar deal, and the buyer retained Vynyl to continue DevOps, engineering, and product support.
Featured Highlights
Optimized Infrastructure
Terraform and Amazon Managed Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Security Upgrades
Application-level frameworks and libraries, and AWS Well-Architected practices
Process Improvements
Re-committed to Agile, and established CI/CD pipelines for continual testing and rapid deployment