Fleet Lab

The Situation

Fleet Lab had built an impressive prototype demonstrating their core technology for fleet management. Early conversations with enterprise prospects were promising, but security questionnaires and technical due diligence kept stalling deals.

The prototype worked great for demos, but it wasn't ready for production enterprise deployments. They needed to level up their infrastructure without losing momentum on sales conversations.

The Constraints

• Enterprise requirements: SOC 2 readiness, audit logging, proper access controls
• Existing prototype: Needed to preserve core functionality while rebuilding infrastructure
• Sales timeline: Enterprise pilots were scheduled, creating hard deadlines
• Team size: Small engineering team that needed to maintain velocity after handoff

The Approach

We focused on the infrastructure and security layers while keeping the core application logic intact.

Weeks 1-2: Assessment & Architecture

• Security audit of existing prototype
• Enterprise requirements mapping
• Infrastructure architecture design
• Multi-tenant database schema redesign

Weeks 3-5: Core Infrastructure

• Dockerized deployment with proper secrets management
• PostgreSQL optimization for multi-tenant workloads
• API authentication and authorization overhaul
• Audit logging implementation

Weeks 6-7: DevOps & Observability

• Terraform infrastructure-as-code for AWS
• CI/CD pipeline with automated testing
• Monitoring and alerting with proper escalation
• Backup and disaster recovery setup

Week 8: Security & Documentation

• Penetration testing and remediation
• Security documentation for compliance
• Runbook creation for operations
• Knowledge transfer to engineering team

What We Built

• Multi-tenant architecture supporting isolated customer environments
• Enterprise authentication with SSO support
• Comprehensive audit logging meeting compliance requirements
• Infrastructure-as-code for reproducible deployments
• Monitoring stack with proactive alerting
• Automated backup and recovery procedures

The Tech Decisions

Why Docker over serverless? The existing Python application had specific runtime requirements and long-running processes that didn't fit the serverless model well. Docker gave us portability and consistency across environments.

Multi-tenancy approach: We chose database-level isolation (separate schemas per tenant) over row-level isolation. More complex to manage, but enterprise customers specifically asked for it, and it simplified compliance conversations significantly.

Terraform for infrastructure: Enterprise deals often come with deployment requirements—specific regions, dedicated infrastructure, etc. Terraform let us parameterize deployments and spin up customer-specific environments consistently.

Results

Fleet Lab passed their first enterprise security review within two weeks of the engagement ending. The pilot deployments went smoothly, and they closed their first six-figure enterprise deal shortly after.

The infrastructure foundation we built continued to serve them well—supporting multiple enterprise deployments without requiring significant rework.