
Enterprise API Rebuild
Scaling a key piece of Amazon infrastructure.
Problem Statement
Our subscription management platform experienced significant growth, evolving from serving early adopters to becoming a major enterprise solution. The legacy monolithic architecture struggled to scale with this growth, resulting in elevated error rates, challenging partner integrations, and reduced development velocity. As customer adoption increased, these technical limitations began impacting business growth and partner satisfaction.
My Role
As technical product leader, I spearheaded the initiative to modernize our API infrastructure. I led cross-functional engineering teams through the architectural transformation, managing stakeholder alignment across engineering, business, and operations. My responsibilities included developing the migration strategy, coordinating with technical program managers and integration specialists, and maintaining executive alignment throughout the project.
Process Overview
The transformation followed a strategic, phased approach. Initially, we conducted a thorough analysis of the existing architecture, uncovering various custom integrations that had accumulated over time. We developed a migration strategy that balanced maintaining existing operations while building the new architecture.
A significant challenge was managing the transition period - supporting active partners on the legacy system while developing the new platform. This required careful resource allocation and prioritization across maintenance and development efforts.
The migration followed a methodical approach: starting with pilot partners for initial validation, expanding to early adopters for process refinement, and finally executing a broad rollout. Throughout this process, we maintained close coordination with technical account managers and integration partners to ensure smooth transitions.
Technology Highlights
We implemented a modern service-oriented architecture, decomposing the monolith into focused services handling distinct business capabilities:
- Modular service architecture for subscriptions and billing
- Enhanced API gateway with robust authentication
- Support for asynchronous operations
- Improved data management with dedicated service databases
- Flexible integration patterns supporting diverse partner requirements
Impact
The transformation delivered substantial improvements across key metrics:
- Significant reduction in transaction processing times
- Dramatic decrease in error rates
- Streamlined partner onboarding process
- Accelerated feature delivery
- Reduced customer support volume
- Enhanced subscription lifecycle automation
Customer & Stakeholder Feedback
Partners reported increased satisfaction with the platform's reliability and performance. The new architecture enabled improved automation capabilities and provided a better technical integration experience. We observed a notable reduction in support incidents and strong adoption of new platform capabilities.
Lessons Learned
The project revealed valuable insights about large-scale system transformation. While the new API improved technical efficiency, we learned important lessons about scaling our onboarding processes. Early discovery of partner requirements proved crucial, as integration complexity often extended beyond initial assessments.
Success hinged on maintaining strong communication channels with stakeholders and carefully orchestrating migrations to minimize business impact. The transformation elevated our technical standards and improved our ability to serve enterprise customers. It demonstrated that complex architectural transformations can be executed successfully while maintaining business continuity through careful planning, clear communication, and strategic technical leadership.
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