api.smarterweather.com is now on production infrastructure
We've completed the migration of the SmarterWeather API to a dedicated production AWS account — with zero downtime, stronger isolation, and the same endpoint you already use.
What changed
As of this week, every request to api.smarterweather.com is served from
our dedicated production AWS account. If you're an API user, you didn't
have to change anything — the hostname, your API keys, response formats,
and rate limits are all unchanged. That was the point.
Why we did it
SmarterWeather started, like most products, with everything in a single AWS account: data pipelines, the consumer app, the developer platform, staging experiments. That's fine until it isn't. Production API traffic deserves hard isolation from development churn — separate blast radius, separate quotas, separate guardrails enforced by organization-level policies rather than convention.
The migration gives us:
- Isolation. Development deploys, load tests, and experiments can no longer contend with production API traffic for account-level limits.
- Tighter security boundaries. Production credentials and secrets live in an account with a much smaller set of principals, enforced by service control policies.
- Cleaner operational posture. Production alarms mean production problems, not a staging test tripping a shared threshold.
How the cutover worked
The API fronts an ECS service behind API Gateway and CloudFront. We stood up the full production stack in the new account, mirrored container images across accounts, and ran it in shadow mode — validating request handling, authentication, metering, and origin verification against real traffic patterns — before touching DNS.
The cutover itself was a paired CloudFront alias move and Route 53 repoint: the hostname detached from the old distribution and attached to the new one in under a minute. Client-visible downtime rounded to zero, and every existing API key kept working because the key store had been replicated ahead of time.
What's next
This migration is one piece of a broader account-separation effort that also brings the consumer app and the developer portal onto cleaner infrastructure footing. If you build on the API and hit anything odd, contact us — but you shouldn't notice a thing.