Same experience here. I am "lucky", I think, as my employer has already been through some very painful experiences (and learned nothing, apparently) - and they

Same experience here. I am "lucky", I think, as my employer has already been through some very painful experiences (and learned nothing, apparently) - and they seem content to let me do whatever the fuck I want, as long as I sufficiently song-and-dance them. And yes, I've made some mistakes along the way. But I've also delivered results I didn't even think were going to be possible when I started. Advice I'd give to people walking this path: 1) You begin in an emergency. Everything is always an emergency. Because production is down. And you will always be wondering why your customers just don't drop you. But do take a moment to establish baseline metrics. Some way to measure how much you're getting, performance-wise, in terms of uptime, records processed, users, customer calls per day, cloud costs. Whatever you can pull out of your ass for minimal effort. Get SOMETHING as a baseline. As you go along, if you miss a deadline, nobody will question you if you can show progress in your metrics against that baseline. 2) The theoretical ideal model web apps may perform radically differently when you start monkeying with the architecture. If the original developers are gone, if the code is more than 5 years old, it may not be feasible to debug the squirrelly behavior you see when you change from a traditional proxy to say, an AWS load balancer. You can burn a shit ton of time trying to troubleshoot things like this. Slapping a band aid on top of 10 years old band aids is not always the right thing to do. But sometimes it's the best approach to delivering results that keep people convinced to fund your effort. 3) even if nobody else in your company has a fucking clue what you're doing, or understands it; document everything.