A comprehensive cloud migration from on-premise infrastructure to AWS with CI/CD automation that reduced hosting costs by 70% and achieved zero-downtime deployments.
The Challenge
CloudShift's three on-premise servers were at 92% capacity during normal operations and regularly crashed during peak usage periods, causing service disruptions for enterprise clients with strict SLA requirements. Deployments were manual, high-risk events that happened after midnight on weekends, taking 4-6 hours each. The infrastructure team spent 70% of their time firefighting hardware issues rather than building platform capabilities. Annual infrastructure costs totaled $200,000 with no room for elastic scaling.
- On-premise servers running at 92% capacity with regular crashes during peak periods
- Manual deployments taking 4-6 hours each, performed after midnight to minimize impact
- Annual infrastructure costs of $200,000 including hardware maintenance, licenses, and colocation
- Average deployment frequency of once per month due to risk and effort involved
- No disaster recovery plan — a single server failure would result in complete service outage
Our Solution
Advenno executed a phased migration to AWS using infrastructure-as-code with Terraform, containerized all applications with Docker and Kubernetes, built CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment, implemented comprehensive monitoring and alerting, and established multi-AZ disaster recovery with automated failover.
- Full infrastructure-as-code with Terraform enabling reproducible environments and disaster recovery
- Containerized architecture on EKS with auto-scaling responding to demand in under 60 seconds
- CI/CD pipelines enabling 15-minute zero-downtime deployments with automated rollback
- Comprehensive monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, and PagerDuty alerting for proactive incident management
- Multi-AZ deployment with automated failover achieving 99.99% uptime SLA
Our Approach
Infrastructure Assessment
Cataloged all applications, dependencies, databases, and network configurations, then designed the target AWS architecture with cost modeling to ensure migration would deliver financial ROI.
Containerization & IaC
Containerized all applications using Docker, wrote Terraform modules for the entire AWS infrastructure, and established GitOps practices for infrastructure management.
CI/CD Pipeline Construction
Built GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines with automated testing, security scanning, container image building, and blue-green deployment to Kubernetes with automated health checks.
Data Migration
Migrated 2.4TB of production data to AWS RDS with DMS (Database Migration Service), implementing continuous replication during the transition period for zero data loss.
Cutover & Optimization
Executed the production cutover during a planned maintenance window with instant rollback capability, then spent 4 weeks optimizing auto-scaling policies, instance types, and reserved capacity for cost efficiency.
The Results
Infrastructure costs dropped from $200,000 to $60,000 annually — a 70% reduction — with the flexibility to scale elastically during peak periods. Deployment frequency increased from monthly to 12+ per day with zero-downtime blue-green deployments. The platform achieved 99.99% uptime for 18 consecutive months, and the infrastructure team pivoted from maintenance to building platform features. Mean time to recovery (MTTR) improved from 4 hours to 8 minutes with automated failover.
Technologies Used
We went from dreading deployments to doing 12 a day without breaking a sweat. Our team finally has time to innovate instead of keeping the lights on. The cost savings alone justified the entire project.