Case Study
Reducing AWS Cost and Deployment Complexity by Moving from 7 Applications to a Multi-Tenant Rails Architecture
The system architecture was divided into:* 3 frontend applications* 3 backend applications* 1 admin applicationTotal: 7 separate applications.Each application had:* Separate repositories* Separate AWS Beanstalk environments* Separate deployment pipelines* Separate Docker deploymentsAs the platform evolved, several operational challenges appeared:* Shared features required repetitive implementation across all applications* Nearly 60-70% of engineering effort for common modules became duplicated work* Every common update triggered 7 separate deployment pipelines* QA cycles became slower because features needed validation across multiple systems* AWS infrastructure and monitoring overhead kept increasing despite relatively low traffic* Development velocity started slowing due to architectural duplicationThe architecture was creating more operational complexity than actual business scale required.
Client Type
IT Staffing & Recruitment Company
Result
The proposed architecture would help:* Reduce AWS infrastructure cost by an estimated 35-45%* Reduce deployment operations from 7 separate releases to a centralized deployment workflow* Eliminate a significant amount of duplicate engineering effort* Improve feature rollout speed* Simplify CI/CD management* Reduce long-term maintenance complexity* Improve engineering productivity and scalability planningThe biggest learning from this project was:Early-stage SaaS systems often become expensive not because of traffic, but because of architectural decisions that introduce unnecessary operational duplication.
Detailed Breakdown
The client initially decided to maintain separate applications for different departments instead of using a multi-tenant architecture. Over time, this created significant development duplication, deployment complexity, and unnecessary AWS operational costs.