Migrating a legacy estate to the cloud

The challenge

A core workload had grown up on aging on-prem hardware with tribal knowledge as its only runbook. Leadership wanted the elasticity and resilience of the cloud — but the system was business-critical and could not afford a risky big-bang migration.

What I built

• Discovery and dependency mapping. Cataloged every service, data flow, and integration so nothing was migrated blind.
• Landing zone. A hardened cloud foundation — networking, identity, and guardrails as code — ready to receive workloads safely.
• Incremental cutover. Migrated in reversible phases behind traffic switching, each with a tested rollback, so risk stayed bounded at every step.
• Observability from day one. Metrics, logs, and dashboards in place before cutover, so the team could see the system’s health throughout.

The outcome

The migration completed with no unplanned downtime and no data loss. The team gained cost visibility, elastic capacity, and — for the first time — a fully documented, reproducible infrastructure they could evolve with confidence.