Legacy System Cloud Migration

Led a comprehensive migration of a mid-sized manufacturing company's legacy IT infrastructure to a cloud-based environment. The project involved moving all business-critical applications, databases, and services from aging on-premises hardware to a modern cloud architecture.

The Challenge

The client was operating critical business systems on hardware that was reaching end-of-life, with increasing maintenance costs and reliability issues. Their legacy applications included custom-built software with complex dependencies, and the company required minimal disruption during the transition. They also needed to improve their disaster recovery capabilities and establish a more scalable infrastructure for future growth.

The Solution

I designed a phased migration strategy that began with non-critical systems to build confidence and refine processes. Using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) for reproducibility, I established a hybrid cloud environment that allowed for gradual migration. Legacy applications were containerized where possible using Docker, with Kubernetes for orchestration. For applications that couldn't be containerized, I implemented carefully tuned VM environments with equivalent resources and performance characteristics. The migration included establishing CI/CD pipelines, comprehensive monitoring, automated backup systems, and a disaster recovery plan with regular testing.

The Results

The entire infrastructure was successfully migrated with only 4 hours of planned downtime spread across several weekends. Operational costs decreased by 35% compared to the previous on-premises solution. System performance improved by an average of 40%, with some services seeing 200% improvement. Disaster recovery tests showed the ability to restore all systems within 30 minutes, compared to the previous estimate of 24-48 hours. The new infrastructure easily accommodated a 30% growth in usage over the following year with no additional major investments.