On-Premise to EU Cloud Migration — Engagement Pattern
How we approach a migration from ageing on-premise infrastructure to an EU cloud platform (Hetzner, Azure or AWS), with containerisation and CI/CD.
Illustrative engagement pattern. This page describes the typical scope, phases, and outcomes of a cloud migration as we run them. It is not a specific customer reference. Concrete engagements are governed by client NDAs; we discuss specific references under NDA on request.
When this engagement fits
A mid-sized organisation running ageing on-premise infrastructure: hardware approaching end-of-life, weekend maintenance windows that the business has stopped tolerating, scaling that requires procurement, a backup story that nobody has tested in eighteen months, and an internal team that spends most of its hours reacting to incidents rather than improving the platform.
The challenge we typically meet
The applications themselves are usually fine. The problem is what they sit on: physical servers in a server room with a single uplink, manual deployment scripts that only one person fully understands, databases that grew on whatever disk had space, and a backup tape that may or may not restore.
How we run the engagement
- Workload inventory and re-host / re-platform decisions — for each application we decide whether it lifts-and-shifts to a cloud VM, gets re-platformed into containers, or is left in place because the migration cost outweighs the saving.
- Target platform selection — Hetzner (EU) for the cost-sensitive workloads where Hetzner's data centres meet the residency requirement, Microsoft Azure or AWS where the customer needs specific platform services or already has tenancy. The choice is per-workload, not company-wide.
- Containerisation with Docker — applications that benefit from it move into containers so dev / test / prod are reproducible and rollbacks are clean.
- Kubernetes where it earns its keep — for the workloads that genuinely need autoscaling, self-healing or rolling deployments. For everything else, a simpler container runtime is honest about what's actually required.
- CI/CD pipelines — automated builds, tests and deployments via GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps, so deploys stop being a calendar event.
- Database migration — PostgreSQL (or whichever engine the customer runs) moves to the cloud with a tested cutover plan and verified data integrity. The cutover window is announced, not improvised.
Outcomes a well-run migration delivers
Infrastructure that scales on demand instead of on procurement. Deploys that are routine instead of ceremonial. Backups that are tested. Monitoring that pages someone when something is actually wrong and stays quiet otherwise. A run-rate cost picture that is transparent — not always lower than on-premise in year one, but predictable, controllable and tied to actual usage.
For a scoped assessment of a cloud migration in your environment, see the cloud infrastructure service page or contact us.