Overview
Overview
Wikimotive is a boutique automotive digital marketing agency serving auto dealers ranging from individual dealerships to national franchise groups. As the company grew, its proprietary content platform became increasingly critical to day-to-day operations.
While the platform was supporting the business, its engineering practices and infrastructure had evolved organically alongside the company's growth. Wikimotive’s engineering team had identified opportunities to modernize areas such as deployment processes, environment consistency, infrastructure management, and automated testing.
Wikimotive partnered with Ten24 to bring additional technical expertise and capacity to its modernization efforts, helping assess the existing environment, refine the technical roadmap, and execute prioritized improvements without the cost and commitment of adding a full-time CTO.
As a Fractional CTO, Ten24 collaborated with Wikimotive, providing ongoing technical leadership and expertise across architecture, infrastructure, development processes, DevOps, and QA.
The Challenge
As Wikimotive continued to grow, the engineering requirements of its internal platform grew with it, creating opportunities to modernize the foundation supporting the platform. Production deployments relied on server-side Git pulls, infrastructure was manually configured, and development, staging, and production environments lacked consistent separation and configuration.
The platform was also running on AWS LightSail with an unmanaged MySQL database, limiting the availability of managed backup, failover, monitoring, and scaling capabilities. Automated testing and development workflows were additional areas identified for improvement, with a focus on reducing release risk and creating more predictable delivery timelines.
Ten24 began by conducting a comprehensive engineering assessment to understand how the platform, infrastructure, development team, and delivery processes operated. The assessment was used to advise Wikimotive and refine a prioritized technical roadmap tied directly to business risk and operational needs.
The Solution
Modern Development & CI/CD
Ten24’s expertise is helping lay the groundwork to rebuild the way software moves from development into production. Separate AWS environments for development, staging, and production create clear boundaries, while a new CI/CD pipeline introduces automated checks, testing, staging deployments, and a controlled production approval process. The new pipeline replaces manual server-side deployments with a repeatable, auditable, and reversible release process.
Cloud Architecture
Ten24 is modernizing Wikimotive’s hosting architecture to better support a production business system. The platform is being migrated away from AWS LightSail toward a more scalable architecture using EC2 with an Application Load Balancer or ECS Fargate for containerized workloads.
Unmanaged MySQL is also being replaced with Amazon RDS, providing managed backups, patching,
monitoring, and failover capabilities.
Infrastructure as Code
Ten24 is using AWS CloudFormation to define and manage infrastructure through code. Networking, databases, compute resources, IAM permissions, storage, and content delivery infrastructure are all being codified and maintained through GitHub.
This makes infrastructure changes versioned, reviewable, and repeatable while reducing configuration drift between environments.
The Results
The engagement is actively progressing against the technical roadmap, with significant improvements already underway.
The engagement has helped refine and prioritize Wikimotive’s technical strategy around business risk and operational needs. The transition to automated and gated deployments is reducing production risk, while infrastructure as code is creating greater consistency between development, staging, and production.
The move toward managed database infrastructure is also bringing greater reliability and operational protection to the platform.
Most importantly, the engagement gives Wikimotive additional technical leadership and expertise across architecture, engineering processes, DevOps, and product delivery—without the cost and commitment of adding a full-time CTO.
