Migrating a Hamburg Logistics Provider from On-Premises to AWS, Reducing Maintenance Costs by 40%

Client Profile

A Hamburg-based logistics technology company operating a SaaS platform for European freight forwarding and warehouse management. The team of 80 manages a platform used by hundreds of logistics partners across Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland.

Industry Logistics & Supply Chain
Location Hamburg, Germany
Company Size ~80 employees
Duration 4 months

Technologies Used

AWS Terraform Kubernetes Docker

Business Challenge

The client operated their entire platform on co-located servers in a Hamburg data centre. Hardware was approaching end-of-life, and scaling for seasonal demand peaks — Black Friday, Christmas, and end-of-quarter surges — required ordering and provisioning new hardware weeks in advance. Maintenance windows caused downtime, and the two-person ops team spent the majority of their time on hardware management rather than platform improvements.

Solution

We migrated the full application stack to AWS over four months. The infrastructure was provisioned with Terraform for repeatability, containerised with Docker, and orchestrated on EKS (Kubernetes). We designed auto-scaling groups tied to actual traffic patterns, configured multi-AZ deployments for high availability, and set up CloudWatch monitoring with PagerDuty escalation. The migration was executed using a blue-green cutover strategy with zero downtime.

Outcome

Infrastructure maintenance costs dropped by 40%. The ops team was freed from hardware management entirely, redirecting their time to platform development. During the first post-migration peak season, the platform scaled automatically to handle 3x normal traffic without manual intervention or performance degradation.

Process

1

Infrastructure Audit

Documented the existing on-premises architecture, mapped all dependencies, and identified workloads suitable for cloud migration versus those requiring re-architecture.

2

AWS Architecture Design

Designed a multi-AZ Kubernetes architecture on EKS with Terraform, optimised for the client's traffic patterns and compliance requirements.

3

Containerisation

Packaged all application services into Docker containers with CI/CD pipelines for automated builds and deployments via GitHub Actions.

4

Data Migration

Migrated databases using AWS DMS with continuous replication, ensuring zero data loss and minimal switchover time.

5

Blue-Green Cutover

Executed the production cutover using DNS-based blue-green deployment. Traffic was shifted gradually with real-time monitoring, achieving zero downtime.

6

Monitoring and Handover

Configured CloudWatch dashboards, alerting thresholds, and PagerDuty integration. Conducted hands-on training for the ops team on the new infrastructure.

Conclusion

By moving to AWS with a fully automated infrastructure, the client eliminated hardware lifecycle management, gained elastic scaling, and reduced costs — all while maintaining zero downtime during the transition.

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