Deploy time cut from 40 min to under 6

Releases were manual, undocumented, and risky; a bad deploy meant a stressful evening and no quick way back.

We built a CI/CD pipeline with automated tests, containerized the app, codified infrastructure with Terraform, and added metrics, logs, and alerting plus runbooks.

Deploys became routine and reversible, freeing the team to ship features instead of firefighting.