15. Tools, Templates, and Checklists
2024-09-01
AWS migration doesn’t start with EC2 or EKS — it starts with templates, reusable decisions, and tested defaults. We’ve invested heavily in infrastructure code, CI/CD logic, observability patterns, and automation so our customers don’t have to reinvent every piece of the journey.
These are the layers of tooling we deliver as part of our standard migration approach.
A mid-sized e-commerce company was collapsing under its own growth. Every time a marketing campaign was launched, the platform would buckle. Customers disappeared at the worst time: peak buying moments. Meanwhile, ad budgets burned in the background.
The infrastructure was modern-ish, but brittle. Applications ran on VMs with manual Kubernetes deploys. There was no formal infra team, just a CTO trying to keep it all glued together. Developers didn’t touch the stack — they relied on a black box maintained by an external vendor. The system had observability in name only: some logs, a few Datadog agents, no usable dashboards.
The company wasn’t unprepared. They had a load balancer and CDN. But the app itself couldn’t handle bursts. The monolithic database couldn’t scale. Marketing and engineering were in silent conflict. Migration became a necessity.
Before anything moved, the team had to observe. Real observability had to be built from scratch — only then could they simulate the spikes that were causing problems. Load testing took time to get right, because even testing required a scalable environment.
Application services were containerized
Configurations were externalized and secrets pulled from AWS-native tools
Aurora MySQL was set up to replicate from the old on-prem database to avoid downtime
Environments were split into dev and prod with two sub-environments each
Deployment tooling was replaced: Jenkins out, GitLab CI in
Within three months, the company moved to full autoscaling. Availability rose to 99.95%. Costs initially spiked to $60K/month, then were optimized down to $35K/month — with better performance.
On-call responsibilities shifted from the CTO to a real ops team. Teams started owning observability for their services. Developers had access to logs, traces, and metrics. For the first time, the people building the product could see it run.
And the culture shifted too. Deployment became routine. Marketing teams no longer feared Friday. The infrastructure no longer had to be explained every week — it worked. The migration didn’t just scale the system, it stabilized the business.
Our base Terraform modules cover the entire AWS foundation — structured to provision a fully usable platform in under an hour.
AWS account bootstrapping (org, billing, access)
IAM + SSO integration
VPC with private/public subnet layout
EKS clusters per zone, with autoscaling and node group config
ALB + NLB with TLS, DNS, WAF support
Observability tooling provisioned with each cluster
Aurora/RDS, S3, SQS, and other common app services
Helm chart-based service deployments
Per-service EKS config (node pools, taints, tolerations, scaling policies)