Case Study · 0042-year partnership · ongoing

48% lower costs, six products, zero downtime.

Client: The American Institute of Architects
Sector: Association · Built environment
Engagement: Managed engineering · full ownership
Duration: 2-year partnership
Members served: 96,000+ professionals
Products owned: 6 mission-critical

48%Operating cost reduction

$25K+Saved within the first 60 days

6Mission-critical products run 24/7

34Server instances decommissioned

01A century-old institution. A modern operating model.

When the team that built the systems is gone, somebody has to take the keys.

Founded: 1857
HQ: Washington, D.C.
Members: 96,000+ architects & professionals
Products under management: 6 mission-critical
Engagement model: Full ownership · 2-year partnership

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) represents over 96,000 professionals and has shaped the built environment for more than a century. It is the largest body of its kind in the United States, and its digital products are how members credential, advocate, access education, and run their practices day to day.

When organizational restructuring removed multiple internal engineering teams, AIA was left with a lean group accountable for six mission-critical products on mismatched protocols, architectures, and stacks — with minimal documentation and almost no institutional context to inherit.

The needs were urgent and simultaneous: keep everything running 24/7, resolve production issues, cut operating costs, and strengthen security and compliance. There was no ramp-up runway. Day one had to be ownership.

02The Challenge

Four problems that arrived at the same time.

Most rescue engagements show up one problem at a time. AIA showed up with four — and all four were already at 11. The order in which we tackled them was the most important decision of the first 30 days.

Six products, one lean team

Six mission-critical products, six different architectures, six different deploy stories — and almost no documentation about how any of it actually worked end-to-end. The lean internal team couldn't simultaneously stabilize all of it.

Fragmented Systems

An expensive, undocumented estate

Seventy-one servers across AWS and Heroku, a long tail of idle instances, and infrastructure decisions made by people who had since left. Monthly cost was unsustainable and nobody had a single map of what was even running.

Cost & Complexity

A risk surface getting wider

Outdated frameworks and libraries, minimal hardening, no formal security posture. The audit risk and breach exposure were both growing month over month — and for an organization with 96,000 members' data, both mattered.

Security & Compliance

Zero tolerance for downtime

Members renew, certify, and access continuing-education credit through these products year-round. Any one of them going dark for even a few hours becomes a board-level incident. The window for a maintenance-window-style rebuild was zero.

Operational Stakes

Thanks to Streaver, all of our products are working 24/7 without any hindrance. They're highly reliable and go above and beyond — skillful, open, and strong problem-solvers who deliver on time and within budget.

Yamini Thirthar KannankuttiDirector, Product Operations · AIA

03Selection

Why AIA handed us the keys.

AIA didn't pick Streaver as a staff-aug vendor. The selection was for a managed-engineering partner who could be trusted to make decisions on its behalf. Four reasons that decision landed with us.

Ownership, not augmentation.

AIA didn't want an augmentation contract. It needed someone who could take full responsibility for six unfamiliar, undocumented products and start making decisions on their behalf — without a six-month learning curve. Streaver had taken over inherited systems before, on similar timelines.

Cost reduction without disruption.

Cost reduction wasn't a stretch goal. It was the unlock for everything else. Streaver came in with a proven approach to consolidating sprawling infrastructure without taking production down in the process.

Credible on security from day one.

Security was a board-level concern at AIA. Streaver's engineers had previously hardened estates ahead of external audits and could speak credibly to the trade-offs of dependency upgrades, patching cadence, and access-control redesign.

A partner for the long arc.

An institution founded in 1857 doesn't change vendors quickly. AIA needed a partner it could trust for years, not quarters. Streaver's senior-only delivery model and stable team composition matched the multi-year horizon the work actually required.

04The Drop

From sprawl to discipline, in sixty days.

The cost story is almost entirely a discovery story. Most of the spend that came out of the estate was on things that didn't need to be running at all — they just no longer had an owner to turn them off.

From sprawl to discipline

Server instances

Before · inherited estate

After · 60 days of triage

13 of 71 servers right-sized, 34 idle instances decommissioned. The first wave of cost reduction was a discovery problem more than an engineering one.

+ Image placeholder

Architecture diagram of the six-product estate, side-by-side before vs. after consolidation. Suggested: hand-drawn-feeling vector to keep the “people made these choices” tone.

05Decisions

Three calls that defined the engagement.

Infrastructure-first, not features-first.

Rather than start with feature work or a flashy redesign, we triaged the entire estate in the first thirty days: catalogued every server, every dependency, every cron, every secret store. Half the cost savings came from finding things that didn't need to be running at all. The other half came from right-sizing things that did.

ResultThirteen of 71 servers downsized, 34 idle instances decommissioned, and $25K+ in annual cost removed inside the first 60 days — before any feature work began.

Full ownership, full transparency.

AIA's internal team was small and could not be expanded. We designed the engagement so that AIA would always own the decision, but Streaver would own the execution and the on-call rotation. Two years later this is still the model — and the trust required to operate this way is the moat, not the technology.

PrincipleIn a managed-engineering relationship, the worst possible outcome is that the client cannot fire you because you alone know how things work. We documented relentlessly to keep that option open.

Harden in place. Modernize where it pays.

We didn't try to consolidate the six products onto a single stack — that would have been a multi-year rebuild with no near-term payoff. Instead we hardened each product where it stood, updated the riskiest dependencies, and tightened access. Modernization happens where it earns its keep, not for its own sake.

06Honest

What we got wrong. What we'd do again.

Patience · Weeks 0-6

We resisted the urge to ship anything for six weeks.

Our first six weeks were almost entirely read-only — reading code, tracing requests, mapping dependencies, and asking AIA's team to walk us through context that no longer existed in any document. That felt slow at the time. With hindsight, it was the single most important investment we made in the partnership.

Scope · Month 4

Two of the six products needed more than we thought.

We initially scoped two of the six products as 'observe only — minimum maintenance.' Within four months it became clear that both needed deeper attention than we'd budgeted for. We renegotiated scope openly rather than absorb the cost silently. AIA's response set the tone for the rest of the engagement.

In progress

Security hardening is a longer arc than cost.

The cost reduction was easier than the security work. Decommissioning idle instances is mostly a discovery problem. Hardening a six-product estate touches every team, every release process, every third-party dependency. We're still paying that work down — and we're honest with AIA about which products are further along than others.

07Outcomes

The numbers AIA renewed on.

Each outcome below is paired with the baseline it's measured against. The figures with TBD badges are the ones we'd like AIA's finance team to confirm before quoting publicly.

Pre-engagement run rate48% lower

Monthly operating cost

Achieved through right-sizing 13 servers, decommissioning 34 idle instances, and removing redundant SaaS spend across the six products.

Day 0$25,000+ saved

Savings inside the first two months

Annualized run-rate impact in the first 60 days, before any deeper modernization landed. The 24-month total figure is being calculated for the next renewal.

TBD · engineer to verify

Frequent off-hours incidents24/7 across all six

Operational reliability

Stabilization of the inherited estate to round-the-clock operation, including a managed on-call rotation across Streaver engineers and AIA's product operations team.

TBD · engineer to verify

Outdated deps · no formal postureExternal audit · framework upgrades · tighter access

Security posture

Hardened the highest-risk products first, established a quarterly dependency-upgrade cadence, and tightened access controls across all six products.

Minimal context, no single source of truthMapped · documented · re-onboardable

Documentation & operability

Application interactions and operational runbooks now exist as documents AIA's team can read on day one — closing the institutional-knowledge gap that triggered the engagement.

Pre-engagement contractTrusted with significant technical decisions

2-year client trust

Earned the latitude to make architecture and vendor decisions on AIA's behalf — the strongest signal that the partnership delivered.

08The Team

Four Streavers. AIA's lean ops team. One on-call.

Every engineer named below was on the team at week one and is still on the team today. Continuity is the whole point of a managed-engineering relationship — the institutional knowledge that triggered the engagement cannot be allowed to leave again.

Tala

Senior Full-Stack

Senior full-stack engineer across the six-product estate — stabilization, hardening, and incremental modernization.

Daniela de la Sierra

Senior Full-Stack

Senior full-stack engineer across the six-product estate, owning day-to-day product work and the on-call rotation.

Yona

Semi-Senior Full-Stack

Full-stack engineer contributing across the managed-engineering engagement.

NicoW

Semi-Senior Full-Stack

Full-stack engineer contributing across the managed-engineering engagement.

How the engagement is structured

Cadence

Weekly product-operations review with AIA. Daily Slack standup across the joint team. On-call rotation managed by Streaver with AIA's product ops as escalation.

Communication & IP

AIA holds full read access to every repository, every secret store, every dashboard. Documentation is in AIA's Confluence so it survives any future vendor transition.

Pricing

Quarterly business reviews tied to two metrics: month-over-month run cost and incident count. Renewal anchored to outcomes, not headcount.

Trust model

All product credentials, infrastructure ownership, and decision rights remain with AIA. Streaver operates as managed engineering, not as a custodian of access.

Two years, traced

WEEK 00Engagement signedTook ownership of six mission-critical products and their entire infrastructure footprint. On-call rotation activated.

WEEK 04Estate triage completeFull estate cataloged — every server, every cron, every secret, every dependency. The first redundancies were already visible.

WEEK 08First wave of savings34 idle instances decommissioned, 13 servers right-sized. $25K+ annualized cost removed before any feature work landed.

WEEK 16Cost reduction milestoneCumulative monthly operating cost reduction crosses 30%. First security hardening pass complete on the two highest-risk products.

WEEK 32Process & docsQuarterly dependency-upgrade cadence established. Operational runbooks live in AIA's Confluence.

WEEK 52Renewal · year oneAll six products at 24/7 reliability for two consecutive quarters. AIA renews engagement and expands decision-making latitude.

WEEK 104Year two · partnership deepens48% cumulative operating cost reduction sustained. Trusted to lead significant technical decisions across the estate.

09Stack

Heterogeneous by inheritance. Disciplined by design.

We didn't consolidate the estate onto a single stack — that would have been a multi-year rebuild with no near-term payoff. We harden each surface in place and let modernization happen where the feature roadmap pays for it.

Languages & Frameworks

TypeScriptstrict, across modernized surfaces
Angulartwo of the six products
Reacttwo of the six products
Emberlegacy surfaces, being modernized incrementally

Application & API

Node.jsLTS, across services
LoopBackAPI framework on the inherited services
RESTcredentialing & education APIs

Infrastructure

AWSprimary cloud, consolidated
Herokuselect services, scoped down
CloudFrontedge & caching
AWS Parameter Storeconfiguration & secrets

Operations

Datadogcentralized observability
PagerDutyon-call & incidents
GitHub Actionsdeploy & CI
Confluencedocs & runbooks (AIA-owned)

10What's Next

The next eighteen months of work.

Stability and cost are now baseline. The next phase of the partnership is about reversibility, modernization, and audit readiness for whatever AIA chooses to pursue next.

Incremental modernization of legacy surfaces.

The remaining Ember surfaces are being incrementally rewritten into React as their feature roadmaps demand it — never as a rewrite for its own sake. Two of three are now half-migrated.

Compliance certifications and audit cadence.

Deeper compliance certification work and a formal external audit schedule, building on the hardening already in place. The target is being audit-ready for any future enterprise partnership AIA chooses to pursue.

Reversibility, by design.

Gradual handoff of operational knowledge to a rebuilt AIA-side engineering team as that team grows back. The goal of a managed-engineering relationship is for the client to always have the option to take it in-house — and to want to keep it with us anyway.

Inherited a tech estate you can't fully staff?

Let's take ownership.

Streaver runs managed-engineering relationships for institutions holding fragmented, mission-critical estates. Full ownership of the execution. Full transparency to the client. Continuity that outlasts the contract.

Book a discovery call See more case studies

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