Success Story
The invisible team behind their clients' uptime.
How Elite Digital handed off their multi-cloud server operations to a team their clients would never see, and never need to.
Build & migrate
Move off the old. Land on the new.
Infrastructure migrations are easy to start and hard to finish. We've finished them. AWS to VMware, on-prem to cloud, one Linux distribution to another, a database two major versions behind to current, the kind of work where the data has to survive and the change window has to hold.
Sounds like
"We need to be off this server by Q3."
What it looks like
You might recognize one of these.
Most migration conversations start the same way: something works, but the place it's running is wrong. Wrong vendor. Wrong contract. Wrong version. Wrong era. Wrong bill.
A contract is ending
Cloud renewal, colo lease, vendor agreement, and the renewal cost or terms aren't acceptable anymore.
The OS is end-of-life
Debian 9, RHEL 6, an Ubuntu LTS past its security window. Patches stopped coming. Auditors started asking.
The cloud bill stopped making sense
What was reasonable at launch isn't reasonable at scale. Time to move workloads where the economics work.
A database is two versions behind
Oracle, MySQL, Postgres. Upgrades got deferred. Now you're stuck on a version with no security updates left.
An acquisition or split
The infrastructure has to move, out of the parent company's environment, or into yours.
You're consolidating
A decade of one-off VMs. Each one runs something important. None of them are documented.
Why it's hard
Migrations fail in predictable ways.
The technical lift is rarely the problem. The problem is everything around the lift, the undocumented assumptions, the integrations no one remembers, the schedule that has to hold while real customers keep using the system.
01
What you have isn't what you think you have
Every migration starts with discovery, because the "production environment" is always bigger than the architecture diagram. Cron jobs, side services, that one script that's been running since 2017, they all have to come too.
02
The cutover window is shorter than the project
Building the destination is the easy half. The hard half is getting from "we have a working replica" to "production traffic is on it" without losing data, dropping connections, or extending the downtime window past what the business agreed to.
03
Rollback isn't a button
If something goes wrong at 2 a.m., reverting isn't a checkbox, it's a procedure that has to be designed, rehearsed, and timed. Migrations that succeed are migrations that planned for the rollback first.
Migrations we've done
optional section
Most paths between A and B, we've walked.
A non-exhaustive list of common routes. If your migration doesn't fit one of these, and many don't, it's almost certainly some combination of them.
AWS
→
VMware / on-prem
Repatriation work: legacy Linux workloads back into customer-controlled infrastructure, often for cost or data-residency reasons.
On-prem / colo
→
Cloud
The classic "move us off the rack", usually triggered by hardware aging out, a colo move, or a board mandate.
Bare VMs
→
Kubernetes
A platform migration, not just a host migration. Hand-built servers consolidated into a real orchestrated environment.
CentOS / Debian 9
→
Modern LTS
Distribution upgrades and replacements, usually when the OS is past end-of-life and patches have stopped coming.
Oracle / MySQL N
→
Latest version
Database major-version upgrades. The schema survives. The queries still run. The auditor stops asking.
One cloud
→
Another cloud
DigitalOcean, AWS, GCP, Azure, Hetzner, the move between them, with care for the data, the networking, and the bill on the other end.
How we approach it
Four steps. No theatrics.
The pattern is boring on purpose. Migrations that go well look like the same set of steps applied to different stacks, not heroic last-minute saves.
-
01
Discovery, what's actually there
Inventory the workloads, the dependencies, the cron jobs, the side services, the integrations no one wrote down. Most migration risk lives in the gap between the diagram and the reality.
-
02
Design, the destination and the path to it
Architect the target environment. Pick the data-transfer strategy (live replication, dump-and-restore, snapshot, storage-level). Plan the cutover. Write the rollback before writing the runbook.
-
03
Rehearse, the cutover in a dry run
For anything non-trivial, the cutover gets rehearsed end to end against a staging environment first. We measure the actual downtime, find what breaks, and fix the runbook before production.
-
04
Execute, the change window holds
Production cutover during the agreed window, with a tested rollback ready, monitoring in place, and someone senior watching the metrics while the switch is flipping. And then we stay long enough to be sure it stuck.
What you walk away with
A migration that actually finished.
✓
Workloads on the new platform
Production traffic, not just a working replica.
✓
Data intact and verified
Pre/post checksums, row counts, application-level smoke tests.
✓
A runbook of what was done
So the next person, yours or ours, isn't starting from zero.
✓
The old environment, cleanly retired
Or kept warm for a defined parking period. Your call.
Adjacent challenges
Often part of the same conversation
Challenge · Build & migrate
Clusters
Designing, building, and running real cluster platforms, multi-tenant when they need to be, production-grade. For teams who want the benefits of a shared platform without the year-long learning curve.
Read moreChallenge · Scale & sustain
High Availability & Reliability
When a system going down isn't acceptable. HAMS is our product line of turnkey high-availability solutions, redundant databases, web, storage, and containers with automatic failover, built and managed so a failed server or a maintenance window never becomes an outage.
Read moreChallenge · Scale & sustain
Monitoring & Observability
Prometheus, Grafana, log aggregation, alerting that doesn't cry wolf. So when something does go wrong at 3 a.m., the right person knows about it, before the customer does.
Read moreGet started
Have a migration that needs to actually finish?
Tell us the source, the destination, and the deadline, we'll tell you whether we've done it before, how long it usually takes, and what the gotchas are. 30 minutes, no obligation.