Off Heroku and onto managed AWS

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

The migration had three focus areas, each of which had to hold before the platform could run on AWS with confidence.

Cloud Combinator structured the work in phases, starting with an assessment that de-risked the decision and produced a plan, then migrating each tier onto its managed AWS service before hardening and handing over.

Acceptance was met when the essential services ran on AWS exactly as they had on Heroku, with the workflow fully functional, best-practice foundations in place, and the environment demonstrated as suitable for the client's continued development. The assessment phase delivered the costed calculator and plan that unlocked the migration, and the migrate phase delivered the working platform and a technical handover.

• Lift-and-shift with no loss of function — The Next.js, FastAPI and PostgreSQL tiers run on Amplify Hosting, App Runner and RDS, with the application workflow behaving as it did on Heroku.
• A managed data move — AWS Database Migration Service moved the curriculum data with a seed-and-delta approach and a backup fallback, keeping disruption to a minimum.
• Best practice from day one — IAM Identity Center with least privilege, a VPC with restrictive security groups, and budget alerts give the client a secure, cost-aware foundation.
• Repeatable environments — The infrastructure is defined in CloudFormation, so the UK and US environments are provisioned consistently and can be changed the same way every time.
• Handover — Documentation and a knowledge-transfer session leave the client's team able to maintain, monitor and iterate on the platform themselves.

With the platform settled on AWS and best practices in place, the client is positioned to make the planned improvements on top of a managed foundation, to migrate the remaining Firebase-held user data into RDS in a later phase, and to scale both environments as demand grows.