# Off a fragile VPS and onto AWS, with almost no downtime

> A growing agtech platform ran on a single server that could neither scale nor be secured. I moved all of it to AWS, live, with almost no downtime, then rebuilt it to scale.

- Client: An Australian agriculture-technology company with a large IoT sensor network (Agriculture technology)
- Role: Architect and lead engineer, Nicolas Dao
- Status: Delivered. At Cloudless Labs
- Capabilities: Cloud migration, AWS architecture, Security, Infrastructure as code
- Web page: https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/vps-to-aws/

## Outcomes

- The whole platform moved from one VPS to AWS with almost no downtime.
- A platform that couldn't scale or be secured became one that does both, defined in code.
- The foundation for everything that followed: real-time IoT, machine learning and a large cost reduction.

## The situation

The business had grown on a single virtual private server. Everything lived on it: the web applications, the databases, the jobs that processed sensor data from farms across the country. It couldn't scale when more devices came online, it was a single point of failure, and it couldn't be secured to the standard a company of that size needs. Every month it ran, the risk grew.

## What I did

I planned and ran a lift-and-shift migration to AWS. Lift and shift first, on purpose: move the systems as they are, prove they run, cut over, and only then modernise. Trying to rewrite and migrate at the same time is how migrations stall for a year.

The cut-over was rehearsed until it was boring, and the business kept running through it with almost no downtime. On the other side, the platform had what the old server never could: accounts separated by environment, access through single sign-on instead of shared passwords, backups, and infrastructure defined in code, so every environment can be rebuilt from the repository.

## Why it matters to you

Most companies that "need to move to the cloud" are exactly here: a server, or a few, that grew with the business and now holds it back. The move itself is rarely the hard part. Doing it without stopping the business, and landing on a foundation you can build on for the next ten years, is.

## Built with

- [Amazon Web Services (AWS)](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/aws/index.md): My default in The Stack
- [Pulumi](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/pulumi/index.md): My default in The Stack
- [AWS Organizations + IAM Identity Center](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/aws-organizations-identity-center/index.md): My default in The Stack
- Lift and shift
- Zero-downtime cut-over

## Related

- [Why I ended up on AWS](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/guides/which-cloud/index.md): the decision guide behind it
- [Cutting an AWS bill from US$240k a year to under US$40k](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/aws-bill-cut/index.md): a related project
- [switch-profile, open-source AWS account switching with SSO](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/switch-profile/index.md): a related project
- [Every project](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/index.md)
- [How we work](https://cloudlesslabs.com/about/how-we-work/index.md)
- [Map of every Markdown file on cloudlesslabs.com, with what each one answers](https://ask.cloudlesslabs.com)