2024 was a year of transitions: wrapping up a multi-year cloud migration project and starting a new chapter in healthcare infrastructure. Here are the lessons that stuck.
The Migration Wrap-Up
Completing a cross-cloud microservice migration is a milestone. The goals that matter most: zero data loss, incidents resolved within SLA, and measurable infrastructure cost savings. Cost savings often come from the target platform's pricing model, but the real value is operational: one cloud platform, one set of tools, one on-call rotation.
The hardest part was the queue migration. Queues are stateful, and state migration is always harder than compute migration. Building a cross-cloud async abstraction library was one of the most technically challenging and rewarding efforts.
The Domain Pivot
Moving to healthcare infrastructure meant learning healthcare compliance, understanding privacy requirements, and thinking about data protection in ways that are different from adtech or general SaaS. The technical work (authorization, CI/CD, Terraform) was familiar. The context was completely new.
Designing a token-based authorization system that enforces least-privilege across many services, while remaining backward-compatible with a legacy auth system, required thinking about both security and developer experience simultaneously.
What Carries Forward
- Migration projects are mostly organizational, not just technical
- Healthcare cloud requires privacy-first thinking at every layer
- Reusable infrastructure (Terraform modules, shared libraries) is the highest-leverage work a platform engineer can do
- Writing about technical work forces deeper understanding