PH Live Music LTD

About the company

PH Live Music is a UK-based live music and events company. I joined the team for a short freelance engagement focused on improving their cloud infrastructure and delivery pipeline.

My journey there

Although the engagement lasted only a few months, it was centered around solving practical engineering problems rather than building new features. The objective was straightforward: review the existing infrastructure, migrate it to AWS, identify unnecessary costs, improve the CI/CD pipeline, and increase the overall reliability of the development workflow.

I started by auditing the AWS environment and looking for opportunities to simplify the infrastructure. Along the way, I migrated services where appropriate, resized resources based on actual usage, and removed components that were no longer needed. Their next.js frontend was deployed on Vercel, so I migrated that to AWS via SST. SST has this serverless setup for next.js that makes it easy to deploy to AWS. That choice was made to reduce infrastructure costs while maintaining the same level of reliability. Their backend was also migrated to AWS via AWS CDK. I used CDK to define the infrastructure as code, which made it easier to manage and deploy changes.

Beyond the cloud infrastructure, I also worked on improving the development experience. The CI/CD pipeline became noticeably faster, typescript build issues were resolved, and the deployment process became more predictable. Since the work was focused on strengthening the foundation of the platform, many of the improvements were not immediately visible to end users, but they made day-to-day development much smoother for the engineering team.

Notable contributions

• Cut infrastructure cost ~60% via AWS migration, right-sizing, and eliminating unused resources.
• CI/CD automation: pipeline runtime ~20 → ~6 min; failure rate under 7%.
• Fixed TypeScript build/module-resolution issues, stabilizing CI; hardened platform security.

Closing thoughts

This engagement reminded me that engineering isn’t always about building something new. Sometimes, the greatest value comes from improving what already exists. Optimizing systems, reducing unnecessary costs, and making deployments more reliable may not be the most visible achievements, but they have a lasting impact on both the product and the people maintaining it.

Although my time with PH Live Music was brief, it reinforced an important lesson: good engineering is not only measured by the features we deliver, but also by how sustainable, reliable, and efficient we leave the systems behind.