Taking an inherited platform back in-house

Tidewater Marine Data aggregates vessel tracking and port data for insurers and commodity traders. Their platform had been built by an external agency over three years and was, technically, well constructed. The problem was that nobody inside the company could change it. Any infrastructure work went to the agency at CAD 190 an hour, averaging 40 hours a month, and out-of-hours incidents were escalated to a supplier under a contract with a four hour response target.

The six engineers were capable application developers with no deep exposure to the deployment or infrastructure layer. There was documentation, but it described what had been built rather than how to operate it, and it had drifted out of date. The commercial motivation was the retainer cost. The operational motivation was a March incident where a four hour response window meant ingestion was stalled for most of a trading day.

External support fell from an average of 40 hours a month to 4 across the three months following the engagement, and the agency retainer was renegotiated to match. At CAD 190 an hour that alone returned the cost of the engagement inside five months.

All six engineers now hold a place in the on-call rotation, and the four hour supplier response window has been removed from the operational picture entirely. Two incidents in the first quarter after handover were resolved internally in 18 and 41 minutes. The runbooks are maintained by the team that wrote them, which is the difference between documentation that stays current and documentation that describes last year's system.