You've just stepped into your role as CTO, only to inherit a revenue-generating system that's gasping for air. With 3,000 daily active users pushing the infrastructure to its — or the team's — limits, what's your next move?
I'd start by talking to the engineering team in a series of one to one meetings, asking each of them what their role is to get to know them and their opinion on the problem is. At this stage there won't be many engineers so it shouldn't take long. I'll have a much better overview of all sorts of issues by the end of that.
Starting with B (finding quick wins) to do C (refactor) is definitely the way to go. Like you said starting with B gains trust with the company that hired you and allows you to get familiar with the system.
You asked for extra ideas for option B. Perhaps you may be able to duplicate the cloud infrastructure and split the user base over the two copies of your system.
You write that refactoring is more messy than a rebuild. Refactoring is more risky, but rewrites are always vastly underestimated. You might make the refactoring less risky by adding a lot of unit tests/integration tests first.
I'd start by talking to the engineering team in a series of one to one meetings, asking each of them what their role is to get to know them and their opinion on the problem is. At this stage there won't be many engineers so it shouldn't take long. I'll have a much better overview of all sorts of issues by the end of that.
Starting with B (finding quick wins) to do C (refactor) is definitely the way to go. Like you said starting with B gains trust with the company that hired you and allows you to get familiar with the system.
You asked for extra ideas for option B. Perhaps you may be able to duplicate the cloud infrastructure and split the user base over the two copies of your system.
You write that refactoring is more messy than a rebuild. Refactoring is more risky, but rewrites are always vastly underestimated. You might make the refactoring less risky by adding a lot of unit tests/integration tests first.