Legacy monolith to containers on AWS
A mid-market software company was stuck: a monolithic application on aging infrastructure, slow releases, and frequent outages. AWS CloudOps migrated and modernized it onto AWS containers with CI/CD, doubling release speed and reaching 99.9% uptime.
The challenge
The application ran as a single large deployment on self-managed servers. Releases were manual, risky and happened once a month at best. Scaling meant buying bigger boxes, and a single component failure could take the whole system down. The team wanted the agility of the cloud without a risky "big bang" rewrite.
Our approach
We used a pragmatic migrate-then-modernize strategy so the business kept shipping throughout.
1. Assess & plan
A Well-Architected review mapped dependencies, data flows and risk. We agreed a phased roadmap with rollback at every step.
2. Migrate
We containerized the application and moved it to AWS, initially lifting the workload with minimal code change to establish a stable baseline and cut infrastructure toil.
3. Modernize
- Ran services on Amazon ECS / EKS with autoscaling and health checks.
- Introduced infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) so environments are reproducible.
- Built a CI/CD pipeline with automated tests, blue/green deploys and instant rollback.
- Added centralized logging, metrics and alerting (CloudWatch) for real observability.
4. Harden & hand over
We applied security best practices (least-privilege IAM, encryption, private networking) and trained the client's team, backed by our 24/7 managed services.
We went from monthly, white-knuckle releases to shipping whenever we're ready, and outages that used to page us at 3am basically stopped.
The results
- 2x faster releases, deployments went from monthly to multiple times per week.
- 99.9% uptime after cutover, thanks to autoscaling and self-healing.
- 70% fewer manual steps in the deploy process, cutting human error.
Get a Well-Architected review and a phased roadmap.