Case Studies | SaaS B2B

Migrating the platform from on-premises to a cloud-native AWS platform

Migration and WAFR

About

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

Challenge

The challenge had four focus areas that defined the engagement.

Escaping brittle on-premises infrastructure

The platform ran on two bare-metal application servers behind a third acting as a load balancer, with development, staging and production all

Preserving data-intensive performance

The platform's proprietary search workflows and direct mailing job pipelines run against large UK property and demographic datasets. The migration had to map these workloads onto the right AWS compute, database and storage services so that performance in the cloud matched or improved on the on-premises baseline.

Migrating without data loss

The single on-premises MySQL 8 instance had to move to a managed database with zero data loss and only minimal downtime at cutover. That meant a considered database strategy, validated data integrity, and careful cutover planning with go-live support.

Independent architectural assurance

A lift-and-shift alone was not enough. The client wanted confidence that the new platform was sound, so a Well-Architected Framework Review across the agreed pillars, with high-risk findings remediated before production go-live, was built into the scope.

Solution

We delivered the work in two clear phases, moving the platform onto AWS with validated data integrity, then subjecting the result to a structured Well-Architected review so that any risks were surfaced and addressed before go-live.

Zero

Data-loss target at cutover, with minimal downtime

2

Delivery phases: migration, then Well-Architected review

Multi-AZ

Managed database resilience replacing a single on-prem instance

By the numbers:

  • Zero - Data-loss target at cutover, with minimal downtime
  • 2 - Delivery phases: migration, then Well-Architected review
  • Multi-AZ - Managed database resilience replacing a single on-prem instance
Changes

The engagement gives the client a re-platformed the platform running on managed AWS services with proper environment separation, managed backups and automated failover, accepted once the platform is demonstrated migrated with validated data integrity and the agreed Well-Architected remediations are complete. The result replaces brittle bare-metal infrastructure with a foundation designed to scale.

  • Managed data layer — The single on-premises MySQL 8 instance is replaced by Amazon RDS MySQL Multi-AZ with automated backups, failover and read replicas as needed.
  • Proper environment separation — Development, staging and production no longer share one server, removing a long-standing operational risk.
  • Cloud-native workloads — The PHP/Laravel application runs as containers on Amazon EKS, with S3, EFS and CloudFront supporting its data-intensive search and mailing pipelines.
  • Architectural assurance — A Well-Architected review across the agreed pillars surfaced prioritised findings, with critical and high-risk items remediated before go-live.
  • Handover — Operational runbooks, as-built architecture documentation and knowledge-transfer sessions leave the platform team able to run the platform on AWS independently.

With the platform now on a managed, Multi-AZ AWS foundation that has been reviewed against Well-Architected best practice, the client has the scalability and resilience its data-driven direct mail business needs, and a platform that is no longer constrained by ageing hardware but ready to grow with demand.

AWS Stack

Amazon EKS

For running the containerised the platform application in an isolated namespace.

Amazon RDS MySQL

(Multi-AZ) for a resilient managed database with automated backups and failover.

Amazon S3

For storage of CSVs, JSON, PDFs and campaign artwork with per-tenant separation.

Amazon EFS

For a shared filesystem mounted across application pods.

Amazon CloudFront

For UK-optimised delivery of static assets.

Amazon Route

53 and Application Load Balancer for DNS, TLS termination and traffic routing.

Amazon ElastiCache Redis

Identified as the scale path for caching beyond in-cluster Redis.

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