How a Global Pharma Company Cut Application Delivery Costs by 60% with Amazon EKS Migration

In today's fast-paced business environment, companies need to be agile and cost-effective to stay competitive. For a global top 20 pharmaceutical company, managing and maintaining infrastructure for hundreds of websites was becoming increasingly costly and difficult. They needed a solution that would simplify maintenance and reduce costs while allowing them to develop, test, and publish new sites quickly.

That's where amazee.io came in. Using automated migration capabilities customized in Lagoon, a web application delivery platform for Kubernetes, the pharma company efficiently moved nearly 3,000 Kubernetes environments from Red Hat OpenShift on AWS to Amazon EKS over two weekends, resulting in simpler maintenance and 60% cost savings.

The pharmaceutical company was running 800 promotional websites, using managed services from amazee.io for Lagoon, and Red Hat OpenShift on AWS for infrastructure. However, deploying on ROSA became too costly and difficult to maintain. The development team was publishing dozens of new Laravel, Drupal, and Node.js websites each month, and each technology required its own hosting provider and processes, adding to the staff's workload.

Moving to Amazon EKS provided a more manageable and cost-effective infrastructure, allowing the company to save 60% in application delivery costs while supporting future expansion. Additionally, amazee.io supports a wide variety of technologies on the same infrastructure, so it was possible to move all of their workloads to a single provider.

To make the migration process as simple as possible, engineers at amazee.io created a custom task in Lagoon to automate the migration process. Lagoon users can now launch a full migration with the click of a button, without having to worry about technical details like GraphQL, APIs, or Ansible, or integrate an external system to manage the migration, which is typically required.

The custom task can be reconfigured and reused to migrate to other infrastructure, in case the pharma decides to later transfer environments away from EKS.

Overall, migrating from ROSA to EKS has been a big win for both the pharma company and amazee.io. The pharma seamlessly migrated 3,000 environments, gained self-service capabilities for additional migrations, and saved 60% in application delivery costs. amazee.io benefited from simpler day-to-day maintenance for Kubernetes clusters, little to no labor required from amazee.io team members for the remaining migrations, and the satisfaction of seeing a customer thrive with Lagoon in new, creative ways.

The case study is an excellent example of how a partnership between a company and a service provider can result in cost savings, increased efficiency, and improved scalability. It shows that using automation and the right tools can significantly simplify complex infrastructure migrations and enable businesses to focus on their core activities.

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