Case Studies | Retail

Charting a confident path from Azure to AWS

Migration Assessment

About

A Retail business working with Cloud Combinator on AWS. The client is anonymised at their request.

Challenge

The assessment centred on three focus areas that a payments platform cannot afford to get wrong.

Understanding a specialised architecture

The platform's use of the Microsoft Orleans actor model and CosmosDB meant a migration could not be a simple lift and shift. The current environment had to be inventoried and understood in detail, including the Orleans cluster, email integration, payment workflows and data dependencies, before any AWS design could be trusted.

Protecting reliability and data integrity

Because the client processes live transactions, the assessment had to surface the risks around cross-cloud connectivity, performance and

Making the financial case clear

A migration decision needs numbers. The client needed their current Azure spend mapped, service by service, against projected AWS costs, so the business case for moving could be judged on evidence rather than assumption.

Solution

Cloud Combinator structured the work as a sequence of phases, each producing a concrete deliverable that fed the next, ending with a migration plan the client could act on.

6

Assessment phases, from discovery to knowledge transfer

Azure to

Migration feasibility assessed end to end

Fully costed

AWS Pricing Calculator and migration plan delivered

By the numbers:

  • 6 - Assessment phases, from discovery to knowledge transfer
  • Azure to - Migration feasibility assessed end to end
  • Fully costed - AWS Pricing Calculator and migration plan delivered
Changes

Cloud Combinator delivered the assessment against its acceptance criteria: a fully costed AWS Pricing Calculator comparing Azure spend to projected AWS costs, together with a documented migration strategy, giving the client everything needed to decide on a full migration.

  • A clear current-state picture — The Orleans and CosmosDB-based architecture was inventoried and mapped to AWS equivalents, removing the guesswork from any future migration.
  • Risks surfaced and mitigated — Cross-cloud connectivity, data integrity and performance risks were documented alongside recommended mitigations.
  • An evidence-based business case — A service-by-service cost comparison between Azure and AWS gave the client the numbers to weigh the migration on its merits.
  • A plan to act on — A preliminary target architecture and a step-by-step migration plan set out exactly how a move to AWS could be executed.
  • Handover — Knowledge transfer sessions equipped the client's internal team to interpret the assessment data and carry the findings into the next phase.

With a costed comparison, a risk-aware architecture and a documented migration plan in hand, the client is positioned to make a confident decision on their move to AWS. The actual migration would be scoped as a separate, subsequent engagement, building directly on the foundation this assessment provides.

AWS Stack

Amazon EKS

For assessing the feasibility of running the Microsoft Orleans actor model on AWS.

AWS Pricing Calculator

For producing a fully costed Azure-to-AWS cost comparison.

AWS IAM

For evaluating the security and access policy implications of the migration.

Amazon VPC

For analysing network topology and cross-cloud connectivity requirements.

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