Migrating consumer-finance infrastructure across five African markets
Moved a serverless platform onto containers one service at a time, and left behind a pattern the client's engineers went on to use without me.
The problem
Yellow Africa runs solar and digital-device consumer finance across five African countries on a purely serverless API Gateway + Lambda platform. Serverless had carried the platform this far, but the operational blind spots were starting to show.
What I did
- Led one engineer, alongside my own hands-on work, on an incremental migration from serverless to containerised AWS ECS services. We moved 5 of roughly 10 services without a stop-the-world rewrite.
- Built a shared authentication service that every new service adopted, removing duplicated auth logic across the platform.
- Replaced basic CloudWatch logging with full Datadog observability (APM, custom dashboards and automated alerting), so the team catches issues before users do.
How I showed up
I measure success by what the team can do after I leave. So alongside the migration I ran internal “nursery day” training sessions to get the wider Yellow engineering team comfortable with the new architecture and patterns. I didn’t want to be the only person who understood them.
Outcome
The broader Yellow engineering team adopted the migration pattern on their own, beyond the services I worked on directly.