Overview
Modernized the entire DevOps pipeline for a company producing customized mobile apps for over 1,000 churches and communities — scaling from 5 app builds per week to over 1,000 per release cycle using Docker, Jenkins, and AWS ECS.
Aware3’s business model made build capacity the bottleneck: every customer gets a customized app, so a release cycle means rebuilding the entire fleet. The modernization was end-to-end — migration from managed hosting to AWS, containerization with Docker and ECS, a move to Aurora MySQL, and a full rebuild of the CI/CD pipeline running Jenkins on Fargate — turning app builds from a hand-tended weekly trickle into an elastic, parallelized system.
Two things make this entry a useful marker. First, the scale change was multiplicative, not incremental: single-digit weekly builds became 1,000+ per release cycle. Second, the outcome had venture-level consequences — the modernized platform was part of what positioned the company for its subsequent acquisition. There is also a longer arc here: I first worked with aware3 around 2010, when IDC Projects built their first iOS and Android prototypes, and returned nearly a decade later to rebuild the infrastructure underneath what that early product had become.