Overview
Elastic Mint provided engineering leadership for one of the UK’s leading luxury wine merchants, taking their custom trading platform from a partially built state, through code remediation and team growth, to a successful production launch.
The Challenge
We inherited a partially built codebase carrying performance risks that had not yet been quantified, with no clear path to production. Getting there meant building a resilient notification layer, putting robust multi-environment infrastructure in place, and replacing single-use deployment scripts with reliable CI/CD pipelines.
Our Approach
We began with a comprehensive code review, using it to build a prioritised remediation roadmap rather than guessing at what mattered most.
- Code review and remediation roadmap: audited the inherited codebase to surface performance risks and technical debt, then prioritised the fixes that mattered most on the way to production.
- Infrastructure as Code: migrated infrastructure to Bicep across six environments, replacing manual setup with repeatable, version-controlled deployments.
- Reliable CI/CD pipelines: replaced single-use deployment scripts with automated pipelines, cutting the risk and effort of every release.
- Event-driven notification service: built a resilient notification layer handling email, mobile push and search index updates, so downstream systems stayed in sync as orders and inventory changed.
- Scaling engineering practices: grew the team and the practices around it, so the platform could be sustained at pace through launch and beyond.
The platform runs on C# and .NET with Azure Functions and Entity Framework Core, using Azure Service Bus for messaging, Azure SQL for storage, Bicep for infrastructure as code, and Algolia and Redis for search and caching.
Outcome
We took the platform live, reaching a stable production go-live after resolving the performance risks inherited at the start of the engagement. In the weeks that followed, we rapidly diagnosed and resolved the database and performance bottlenecks that only surfaced under real production load.
We also left the client with long-term operational autonomy: automated code review, deployment checklists and clear handovers meant their team could run and extend the platform with confidence once we stepped back.
Where we go next
Having taken the platform from a partially built state through to a stable production launch, Elastic Mint is well placed to support further work as the platform evolves, whether that is performance tuning, new features, or extending the operational practices already in place.
