New contract and challenges

I've just started on an IT Infrastructure Engineer contract.  The contract had three main challenges.

First, the existing IT Infrastructure team consisted of a head of IT and an Infrastructure Engineer. The head of IT is leaving two weeks after I start, and the engineer another 2 weeks later. Another contractor is joining me in a week. There will be a fair amount of hand over to take over the running of the IT estate within a few weeks.

Second, the company is part of a group that has recently bought a few other companies. There is going to be some change and an appetite for increased standardisation and cooperation – queue a few changes on the horizon.

Thirdly, their core ERP system is to be moved from a hosted server to Amazon AWS. This is where most of my time will go, if I can get away with it. It's probably also where a significant portion of my posts in the next while will come from. Some background then:

The company does a significant proportion of their trade through web sites, all hosted on AWS, with .net applications deployed with Elastic Beanstalk, and communicating with internal systems via a web service.

Their core ERP system runs on a single server that also contains the SQL server, web service, and a number of other core systems. The system is hosted off site. The obvious risk is not in the hosting, but in the very heavy reliance on disparate systems sitting on a single server.

Most of their core systems are bespoke, developed in house by a team of developers on a Windows platform. Unfortunately the developers are also over stretched on changes to the underlying commercial model used by the company, so I'd rather move things with minimum change.

I've got approval to proceed with the project as “top priority”, based on a four stage plan, and have estimated a very ambitious eight week time scale. I have made it clear that the time scale is a best case estimate – any surprises may require a redesign and may significantly impact the time scale. Also, it does depend on some developer and testing input, and they all have “top priority” projects on the go. I'm managing the project as well as doing the engineering.

More on how I get on soon.