FlowOps builds workflow automation software for logistics companies. Their platform processes millions of shipment events daily. Reliability isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the product.
Extraction before containerisation
We resisted the urge to containerise the monolith as-is. Instead, we spent the first four weeks identifying natural seams in the codebase: places where services could be extracted with minimal shared-state risk. This gave us smaller, more testable units and avoided the classic “distributed monolith” antipattern.
Blue-green at every layer
Every service ships with a blue-green deployment strategy. Load balancer weights shift gradually (5%, 25%, 50%, 100%) with automated rollback triggers wired to error rate and latency SLOs. No engineer needs to babysit a deployment.
Cost engineering
The 70% cost reduction came from three places: right-sized instances (replacing one 32-core server with autoscaling groups of smaller nodes), spot instances for non-critical batch workloads, and S3 lifecycle policies on log retention. We documented every saving so the team can continue optimising.
