Challenge
Fenwick Capital shipped every release by hand. Engineers ran SSH scripts against production servers one at a time, and no consistent staging environment existed to catch problems before they reached customers. A senior engineer had to babysit each deployment from start to finish, watching logs and ready to intervene if something broke.
That process took roughly two hours per release, and rollbacks were common. Each rollback meant repeating the manual sequence in reverse, under pressure, with the same engineer who had just run the deploy now running the recovery.
As a regulated fintech company, Fenwick faced a second problem beyond speed: auditability. The deployment process left no structured record of what changed, when, or who approved it. That gap created real exposure during compliance review and made every release a source of anxiety for the team, which in turn slowed down how often they were willing to ship.
Approach
Nex Lab Systems started with an audit of Fenwick's existing infrastructure to map what was running where, which services depended on which manual steps, and where the biggest points of risk sat in the deployment sequence.
From there, Nex Lab Systems rebuilt the infrastructure as Terraform-managed code, replacing hand-run server configuration with version-controlled definitions that could be reviewed, tested, and reproduced. On top of that infrastructure, Nex Lab Systems built a CI/CD pipeline with automated test gates and a required staging deploy before any release could reach production. No release could skip staging or bypass the test suite.
Nex Lab Systems also added structured deployment logging so every release generated an audit trail automatically, without anyone having to document it by hand afterward.
The migration ran service by service over six weeks rather than as a single cutover. Each service had its own rollback plan before migration began, so Fenwick's team could move to the new pipeline without betting the whole platform on one change.
Result
Deployment time dropped from roughly two hours to about 70 minutes end to end, a 40% reduction. The gain came from removing manual steps and giving the pipeline a defined, repeatable sequence instead of one that depended on an engineer's judgment call at every stage.
Rollback incidents dropped as a result of the required staging gate, which now catches problems before they reach production instead of after.
Deployments are now self-service. Any engineer on the team can ship a release without pulling in a senior engineer to supervise it, which was not possible under the old process. Every deployment also produces a full audit trail automatically, giving Fenwick's compliance team the documentation they need for review without extra manual work from engineering.