Cloud Migration Without Production Chaos

Case Study: Cloud Migration for a Healthcare Platform

Context

A healthcare startup operating an electronic health record (EHR) platform needed to migrate its production infrastructure from a collection of manually managed EC2 servers to a more automated and auditable cloud environment.

The system consisted of more than 30 interconnected services and workers supporting application functionality, background processing, email delivery, billing workflows, and other operational tasks. The platform handled sensitive healthcare data and therefore required infrastructure that met HIPAA security requirements.

Challenges

• Large multi-service architecture with numerous background processes
• Manual deployment procedures and inconsistent infrastructure configuration
• Strict security and compliance requirements for healthcare data
• Limited internal infrastructure expertise at the time of migration

Approach

The migration focused on modernizing the system’s infrastructure and deployment workflows while minimizing operational risk. Over the course of several months, the system was incrementally migrated to a containerized architecture running on AWS.

• Containerized all application components using Docker and AWS ECR
• Migrated staging and production environments to AWS ECS
• Automated container builds and deployments using GitHub Actions
• Implemented infrastructure-as-code using Terraform
• Centralized secret management using AWS Secrets Manager
• Introduced structured monitoring, logging, and alerting with Datadog
• Implemented HIPAA-focused security controls including encrypted storage and strict IAM policies
• Documented deployment and infrastructure processes for auditability

Results

• Successful migration of a complex healthcare system to a containerized cloud architecture
• Fully automated deployment pipelines replacing manual release procedures
• Improved operational reliability and visibility through centralized monitoring
• Infrastructure configuration and deployments managed through version-controlled workflows
• Retirement of legacy server infrastructure