47 production accounts, no platform team, eight weeks. DORA-ready.
An EU mid-market fintech (anonymised at their request) had outgrown a single-account AWS setup three years prior, and DORA was nine months out. We rebuilt the foundation in eight weeks with no platform-team headcount, then handed the keys back.
By the time we walked in, the team had 47 production accounts spread across two AWS organisations, an identity model that had been patched twice, and an audit calendar that left them four months to produce evidence they hadn't started collecting. The CTO had been told by two big consultancies that the work was a six-month engagement starting at €380k.
The brief was specific: get to DORA-ready, hand the foundation back so the team owns it, do it inside one quarter, do it without hiring. The success metric was the same on both sides: the team being able to fire us at the end without it hurting.
What we did, in order.
- [01] / AUDIT
45 minutes, three questions.
What's the regulator going to ask. What's the team able to defend. What's the runbook when production fails. We sent a written summary that afternoon.
- [02] / DESIGN
Reference architecture, one week.
AWS Organizations restructure, Identity Center as the single front door, network topology rebuilt around shared services, evidence-as-code from day one. Signed off by their security lead on day five.
- [03] / BUILD
Six engineers, six weeks.
Terraform-first. Daily standup, weekly written update either way. By week three the first three application teams were onboarding to the new accounts. By week six, every production workload had moved.
- [04] / EVIDENCE
DORA pack, on autopilot.
Service catalogue in Backstage, recovery objectives as SLOs, evidence generated from CloudTrail + OpenTelemetry, third-party register as YAML in the same repo. The auditor read the YAML directly.
- [05] / HANDOFF
Runbook, then exit.
Onboarding docs, IaC repo, the next ten things to do, the names of the two senior engineers they should hire to extend the platform. We left on week eight.
What happened next.
DORA evidence pack accepted on the first audit attempt, eight months ahead of the deadline. Deploys went from one a week (cumbersome, manual) to fourteen a day across the application teams. FinOps savings tracked at 31 percent in the first quarter after handoff, driven mostly by the networking and managed-service inventory passes (the boring 80 percent of FinOps wins, as we've written elsewhere).
Six months on, the team has hired two of the three engineers we recommended, retired one of the original consultancies' contracts entirely, and started planning their first AI use case on the same platform substrate. We've not been re-engaged. That's the design.
- 14× Deploy frequency post go-live.
- 31% FinOps savings, first quarter.
- 8 wks Audit to handoff.
- 0 Re-engagements. Painless exit by design.
"We stopped firefighting. We can finally hire the team we wanted, not the one our last vendor needed."
Platform Director · Anchor Fintech