You're new to the organization and were hired to help the company go from rough, ship-first, relatively low quality practices to high quality and scalable best

You're new to the organization and were hired to help the company go from rough, ship-first, relatively low quality practices to high quality and scalable best practices. In order to make this a reality, you're going to need to first be very understanding and cognizant of the existing team and the reason they do what they do. This is the only way to inform your decisions on: 1. Which changes are most high priority ie business impact 2. Which changes will require significant team buy-in 3. Which changes will make the most sense for your team I very strongly recommend you start with some easy wins: - Bad key management? Use env variables - Autoscaling (as you mentioned) - Clean up no longer in-use aws services to save $$$ Once you've made an improvement or two, then start tackling some of the problems that require more buy-in. This is anything that affects others' workflows or pace of work. If the founder is cowboy-coding and pushing things directly to prod, you're going to need to get his buy-in to change his workflow. Come up with a document, plan, or RFC for anything that requires buy-in. Get comments from relevant parties for your plan. Then, and only then, implement the plan. 3 weeks really isn't that long. You still have plenty of time to right this ship.