The challenge
Moving to AWS is more than lifting servers. The workloads had to stay secure in their new environment and cost a sensible amount to run. Some systems had good reasons to stay on-premises, and the team that would operate the result had to be able to understand and maintain it.
Workloads migrated
- Containerised application workloads.
- Load-balanced web front ends.
- Databases moved to managed MariaDB.
Constraints that shaped the design
- Systems that need to remain on-premises, making the target a hybrid environment rather than a wholesale move.
- Running cost, which favours right-sized designs.
- The skills of the team that will operate the environment, which favour fewer moving parts and clear documentation.
- Security exposure, which means limiting what is reachable and how.
Role
HandleTec carries out the technical work: mapping the existing environment, designing the target, migrating the workloads and hardening the result. AWS migration work has spanned SMEs and larger organisations.
Approach
- Map workloads and their dependencies, and decide what moves and what stays.
- Containerise the application workloads and run them on EC2 behind Elastic Load Balancing.
- Move databases to RDS, replacing self-managed database servers.
- Harden access, network exposure and secrets.
- Document how the environment operates, and hand it over to the team that will run it.
Security and operational considerations
Access, network exposure and secrets are hardened as part of the migration rather than left for later. Moving databases to a managed service takes day-to-day database administration off individual servers. The handover documents how the environment operates, so the team that owns it can run it with confidence.
What it enabled
- Managed databases instead of self-managed database servers.
- An application tier running behind load balancing.
- An environment the owning team can run and afford.