How CFA Institute migrated from n8n and scaled production-critical monitoring with Windmill

About

CFA Institute is a global association of investment professionals that sets standards and provides education for the financial services industry, serving hundreds of thousands of investment professionals worldwide. Their SRE team needed to replace n8n and scattered AWS Lambda scripts with a platform robust enough to handle production-critical monitoring, complex integrations, and rapid deployment requirements—all while meeting enterprise compliance standards.

The Problem

CFA Institute's SRE team faced a common enterprise dilemma: they needed to automate frequent operational tasks, but their company's maintenance requirements made rapid deployment nearly impossible.

"Our company has some strict requirements around maintenance and deployment process to get those into production. So it was really difficult for us to get a script up and have it quickly deployed and easily maintained by the team."

— Cam Barts, SR Manager, SRE

The team had been using a patchwork of solutions—ad hoc scripts deployed as AWS Lambdas or Azure functions, n8n for basic automation workflows, and manual processes that couldn't be quickly automated. While n8n worked for simple automations, the platform hit its limits as their needs grew more complex.

The critical requirements they needed:

• Real Programming Capabilities - Complex business logic beyond visual workflows
• Production Reliability - Mission-critical monitoring that can't fail
• Rapid Deployment - Bypass enterprise change management for script iterations
• Team Collaboration - Proper version control and Git workflows
• Scale - Handle hundreds of executions per hour with complex orchestration

"We needed something that was going to be a lot more robust, something that we could actually write code inside of. Windmill was kind of a natural evolution from n8n."

— Cam Barts

The Solution

# Example CFA Institute synthetic monitoring script

def main(endpoint: str, expected_status: int = 200):
    # Real Python with full ChromeDriver integration
    from selenium import webdriver
    
    options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
    driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)
    
    try:
        driver.get(endpoint)
        # Complex validation logic here
        return {"status": "success", "timestamp": datetime.now()}
    finally:
        driver.quit()

The Result

After seven months in production, Windmill usage has "exploded" across CFA Institute's IT organization. What started as a single SRE team pilot has grown into organization-wide demand, with multiple teams actively building and weekly requests for expansion.

The platform has proven production-stable for their most critical workloads: 25 synthetic tests running every 5 minutes without failures, platform updates every 2 weeks with zero incidents, and mission-critical monitoring that directly protects revenue-generating processes.

The transition from n8n required only brief training sessions before the entire team became productive and, ultimately, advocates. Business stakeholders and non-technical teams now have access to sophisticated automation through Grafana dashboards, Teams bot queries, and auto-generated UIs—all powered by real code underneath that developers can iterate on rapidly.

Conclusion

CFA Institute's journey from n8n to Windmill demonstrates how the right platform can transform isolated scripts into an enterprise-wide automation layer. By choosing a developer-first platform that supports real code, Git workflows, and production-grade reliability, they've built mission-critical infrastructure that protects revenue while enabling rapid iteration.