July 21, 2025
Author: Kat Calejo
When you’re moving fast, infrastructure shouldn’t slow you down.
That was the case for our client, a real estate tech firm that supports CRE clients with big demands and lean teams.
They needed a secure, scalable AWS environment they could spin up fast, without drowning in manual setup or dragging engineers away from product work.
So, we built them exactly that. In just a few days, we stood up a fully automated, production-ready cloud environment using Terraform. Complete with encrypted SQL Server RDS, tight IAM controls, built-in backups, and seamless Datadog logging. It’s repeatable, compliant, and deploys in minutes.
The best part? Their team can now scale and ship without the DevOps drag. Keep reading to see how we did it.
The Client
Our client is a mid-sized real estate tech firm serving large commercial portfolios across North America. Their bread and butter? Helping landlords and operators manage properties more efficiently with a suite of data-driven tools and portfolio insights.
They’re not huge, but they’re growing fast, and with that growth comes pressure.
More data. More users. More demand for uptime and visibility. They needed to modernize how they handled infrastructure without slowing down development or risking disruption to their clients.
The Problem
Our client was on a fast growth track, but their infrastructure wasn’t keeping up. Every new deployment felt like rolling the dice. The team was spinning up environments manually, juggling inconsistent configs, and spending hours babysitting cloud resources that should’ve just worked.
Legacy AWS setups were fragile and poorly documented, and no one had time to untangle them, least of all their engineers, who were stuck in the weeds instead of focusing on building the product.
Security was another concern. Access controls weren’t standardized. Backup processes weren’t consistent. And there wasn’t a clear system in place for observability or incident response.
They needed a repeatable, secure foundation that scaled with them, without burning time, energy, or innovation cycles.
The Solution
To streamline deployment and tighten cloud security, we built a fully automated, modular Terraform configuration designed for repeatable Windows infrastructure builds in AWS. Viktoriia, one of our top cloud engineers, led the effort.
Using Terraform, Viktoriia created infrastructure-as-code that could deploy a secure Windows-based environment in minutes, not days. Every piece was designed for repeatability and resilience: EC2 instances with hardened access, SQL Server databases with encryption and smart backup retention, custom IAM roles to support native S3 backups, and strict security groups to keep the bad actors out and the right people in.
She didn’t just stop at standing it up. Viktoriia integrated logging and monitoring from day one using Datadog and CloudTrail, wired through a Lambda that shipped logs straight into their observability stack. No more guessing games.
Credential handling? Automated. Permissions? Tight and transparent. Compliance tooling? Baked in.
Now, instead of fighting fires, their engineers have infrastructure they can actually trust, and a clear blueprint they can reuse as they scale.
The Results
Within days of deployment, the client had a fully operational, production-ready AWS environment that is now secure, scalable, and built for repeatability.
Here’s what they walked away with:
Zero to production in minutes, not days. Infrastructure is now spun up via Terraform modules with minimal manual intervention.
Stronger security posture with scoped IAM roles, encrypted RDS backups, and locked-down access to EC2 instances.
Real-time visibility through Datadog and automated log forwarding for proactive monitoring and compliance.
Cost control baked in. Using auto-generated credentials, streamlined backup policies, and automated cleanup, the client avoids unnecessary spend.
Less firefighting, more building. Their engineers no longer waste hours on environment setup or troubleshooting infrastructure drift. That time goes back into product development.
In short: a flexible, secure foundation that scales with them, without distracting from what they do best.
Who We Are
We’re Network Thinking Solutions, the team companies call when tech complexity starts getting in the way of growth.
We specialize in helping small to midsize real estate teams build secure, scalable infrastructure that doesn’t require a 10-person IT department to manage.
Whether it’s tightening up cloud security, automating infrastructure with Terraform, or giving your engineers their time back, we’re here to make IT work for you, not the other way around.
Ready to free up your team and build on a foundation that actually scales? Let’s talk.