AWS delivery-readiness assessment ahead of a multi-region commerce migration.
Six-week assessment: production telemetry, deployment maturity, AI-tooling fit. Output was a 40-page execution plan their internal team is now running - we returned to lead the search-experience rebuild.
What we walked into.
A specialty retailer with a single-region AWS footprint preparing to expand into three regions over the next year. The CTO wanted an honest read on whether the existing platform - and the existing team - could carry the migration without the wheels coming off.
Two consulting firms had pitched build-led engagements. The CTO wanted the assessment first: tell me what's good, tell me what isn't, and tell me what to fix in what order before anyone touches infrastructure.
"Two firms wanted to start building. They wanted to read first. The forty-page plan saved us from at least two of the choices we were about to make. That's the assessment I needed."
Experience, data, activation, optimization.
Storefront, checkout, and search experience reviewed across desktop and mobile. Performance budgets vs. actual telemetry mapped page by page.
Product, inventory, and order data flow audited end-to-end. Region-readiness gaps documented (latency, eventual consistency boundaries, currency / tax model).
Checkout funnel and search conversion instrumented properly for the first time. Quick-win opportunities flagged separately from migration-dependent work.
Deployment maturity, observability stack, and on-call posture scored against a delivery-readiness rubric. Improvement plan ordered by ROI, not by team preference.
The engagement, phase by phase.
- 01Week 1
Intake + scope-lock
Read the architecture docs, the on-call channel, the last six months of incidents. Locked the assessment scope with the CTO + VP Engineering.
- 02Week 2–4
Deep read
Telemetry review, deployment maturity scoring, AI-tooling fit assessment. Paired with their senior engineers for two days each week.
- 03Week 5
Plan authoring
Forty-page execution plan: prioritized improvement backlog, region-readiness sequence, observability + deployment uplift, AI-tooling pilots.
- 04Week 6
Readout + decision
Readout to CTO + exec team. Plan handed over. We returned three months later to lead the search-experience rebuild as a build engagement.
The stack and the pod.
- Cloud
- AWS · single-region today
- Compute
- ECS Fargate + Lambda
- Data
- RDS Aurora · DynamoDB · OpenSearch
- Observability
- Datadog + custom SLO model
- Commerce
- Headless · custom
- 1× Engagement Director
- 1× Principal AWS architect
- 1× SRE / observability lead
- 1× Commerce experience lead
- 1× AI tooling assessor