Lifeworks
Legacy on-premises infrastructure migrated to AWS with zero customer-facing downtime
Lifeworks needed to migrate its core platform from aging on-premises infrastructure to AWS to support product growth and reduce operational overhead. We led the migration strategy and execution, delivering a modern cloud architecture without disrupting the customer experience.
The Challenge
Lifeworks operated its platform on co-located data center infrastructure that was approaching end-of-life. Hardware refresh costs were escalating, scaling required months of lead time for procurement and provisioning, and the operations team spent a disproportionate amount of time on infrastructure maintenance rather than product development. The platform served enterprise customers with strict uptime requirements — any migration-related outage would trigger SLA penalties and risk customer relationships.
Our Approach
We began with a comprehensive workload assessment, classifying every application and service by migration complexity and business criticality. We designed a phased migration strategy that prioritized non-production environments first (building team confidence and refining processes) before moving production workloads.
For the core platform, we chose a re-platform approach rather than pure lift-and-shift — containerizing applications with Docker and deploying on EKS, which gave us the scalability benefits of cloud-native architecture without a full application rewrite. We implemented infrastructure as code from day one using Terraform, ensuring the new environment was fully reproducible and auditable.
The migration itself was executed using a blue-green pattern at the infrastructure level. We built the complete AWS environment in parallel with the existing data center, migrated data using AWS Database Migration Service with continuous replication, and cut traffic over during a planned maintenance window after extensive validation. We maintained the on-premises environment in standby for 30 days post-migration as a safety net.
We also rebuilt the monitoring and alerting stack on CloudWatch and Datadog, giving the operations team significantly better visibility into platform health than they had on-premises.
The Results
Zero customer-facing downtime during the migration — the blue-green approach and continuous data replication enabled a seamless cutover.
Infrastructure costs reduced 28% — even before optimization, the move from owned hardware to cloud reduced total cost of ownership. Auto-scaling further reduced costs by matching capacity to actual demand.
Deployment speed improved 5x — new environments that previously required weeks of hardware provisioning are now available in minutes.
Scalability unlocked — the platform auto-scales to handle peak loads, supporting product features that were previously impossible due to infrastructure constraints.
Operations team redeployed — with infrastructure management largely automated, two operations engineers transitioned to product engineering roles, increasing the team's feature delivery capacity.
DR capability established — multi-AZ deployment and automated backup provided disaster recovery capability that would have cost significantly more to build on-premises.
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