Case Studies | SaaS B2B

From DigitalOcean to AWS without a flag day

DigitalOcean to AWS Migration

About

A SaaS B2B business working with Cloud Combinator on AWS. The client is anonymised at their request.

Challenge

The challenge had three focus areas, each central to moving a live platform without disrupting the business that runs on it.

Move a live platform without losing data or uptime

Roughly 20.67 TiB of customer data across some 176 million objects, plus the production PostgreSQL database, had to migrate with no confirmed data loss, and production go-live had to fit inside an agreed maintenance window with rollback available throughout.

Preserve messaging and device workflows

The RabbitMQ and Celery messaging model, WebSocket routing, and Mender device management and OTA workflows all had to keep working. MattaBox and the client's devices needed to communicate with the AWS-hosted backend exactly as before.

Migrate like-for-like, not rewrite

The engagement deliberately avoided re-architecture: PostgreSQL, the RabbitMQ and Celery model, GitHub, Sentry, New Relic, and the existing OpenAI and Gemini integrations all stay as they are, with managed AWS equivalents chosen to keep the move close to lift-and-shift.

Solution

The migration was delivered in staged phases, standing up and validating a full AWS environment before any production traffic moved.

20.67 TiB

Customer object storage migrated from DigitalOcean Spaces to Amazon S3

176M+

Objects transferred and validated by count and sampled checksums

1 DNS

Controlled production go-live with a retained rollback window

By the numbers:

  • 20.67 TiB - Customer object storage migrated from DigitalOcean Spaces to Amazon S3
  • 176M+ - Objects transferred and validated by count and sampled checksums
  • 1 DNS - Controlled production go-live with a retained rollback window
Changes

The migration moves the client onto a single managed AWS estate while keeping the platform, its messaging model, and its device workflows behaving as before. Acceptance is defined by production running on AWS after DNS cutover, validated data migration, and the client sign-off on production stability before DigitalOcean is decommissioned.

  • Managed-service parity — DigitalOcean services map to AWS equivalents one-for-one: ECS on Fargate, RDS for PostgreSQL with a read replica, ElastiCache, Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ, S3, and AWS-hosted Mender.
  • Devices kept talking — WebSocket routing runs through the ALB, Amazon MQ preserves the RabbitMQ and Celery semantics, and Mender OTA and MattaBox connectivity are validated against the AWS-hosted backend.
  • Safe cutover — The parallel build, migration dry runs, and controlled DNS cutover keep DigitalOcean available for rollback, with a hypercare soak before decommissioning.
  • No re-architecture — PostgreSQL, the RabbitMQ and Celery model, GitHub, Sentry, New Relic, and the OpenAI and Gemini integrations all stay unchanged, keeping the move low-risk.
  • Handover — Terraform code, operations, cutover, rollback, and incident runbooks, and CloudWatch dashboards are delivered, with DigitalOcean decommissioned after stability sign-off.

With the platform consolidated on AWS, the client has a managed foundation with room to grow, including future edge and IoT modernisation and AI workloads that are noted as separate scope beyond this migration.

AWS Stack

Amazon ECS

On AWS Fargate for the containerised backend, frontend, Celery workers, and supporting services.

Amazon RDS

For PostgreSQL, with a read replica, for the production database and the AI team's read-only access.

Amazon ElastiCache

For the Redis-compatible cache.

Amazon MQ

For RabbitMQ for the Celery message broker, preserving AMQP semantics.

Amazon S3

For customer data and Mender artefacts, migrated with AWS DataSync.

Application Load Balancer

For HTTPS and WebSocket ingress.

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