Moments of impact from Michael Cox's career
When I joined ProfitWell, the infrastructure was running on Heroku instances—a setup that worked for getting started but had become a significant constraint on our growth. Engineers were manually pushing code from their local machines directly to production without any CI validation, which introduced deployment risk. Heroku's IaaS costs were substantially higher than running our own VMs on AWS, and we were rapidly approaching their hard limit of 10 instances per service on our main processing workload. For a bootstrapped company planning to scale, this wasn't sustainable. My mandate was clear: support 10x growth in data processing volume while keeping infrastructure costs in check, and accomplish it without downtime or expanding the ops team. I executed a carefully staged migration to eliminate these bottlenecks. I started by provisioning a parallel Kubernetes cluster in AWS and building Terraform modules to codify each service's infrastructure. Next, I established CI/CD pipelines in CircleCI that automated Docker image builds and deployments via Helm charts—replacing the risky manual process with a reliable merge-and-deploy workflow. To minimize risk, I migrated services incrementally, beginning with lower-priority background jobs before tackling the customer-facing API. The results were immediate and measurable. We cut infrastructure costs by roughly 20% right away while completely removing the scaling ceiling that Heroku had imposed. The new Kubernetes environment could scale horizontally to meet our 10x growth target without architectural rewrites. Just as importantly, the CI/CD automation freed engineers from manual deployment toil and dramatically reduced deployment risk, allowing the team to ship faster and with greater confidence. This foundation enabled ProfitWell to scale efficiently without ballooning headcount or cloud spend.
