TechnicalTeam leadership

Moving a live insurance platform to AWS inside one short window

A production cutover on a product where downtime is not an inconvenience. Someone buying cover at 9pm may be driving at 9:05.

At a glance

Situation: A live insurance platform had outgrown its infrastructure: admin pages slow enough to breed workarounds, API timeouts appearing at traffic peaks.
Stakes: Cover has to be live the moment someone pays. A timeout during checkout is a customer who does not come back, and there is no acceptable maintenance weekend.
My role: Co-founder and Chief Product Officer. Led the cutover plan, rollback criteria, migration window and post-migration performance tuning.
Constraints: Production system with real-time coverage obligations, a small team, and one short agreed window.
What changed: Under 30 minutes of planned downtime, no loss of service across the move
Admin page loads 50–70% faster and API responses under two seconds at peak after tuning
Read this if: You need to change the ground under a live product that cannot afford to be down.

planned downtime, start to finish: Under 30 minplanned downtime, start to finish
service stayed available through the move: No outageservice stayed available through the move
faster admin page loads afterwards: 50–70%faster admin page loads afterwards
API responses at peak load: Sub-2-secondAPI responses at peak load