Challenges
The client operated a legacy on-premises Kubernetes environment with outdated CI/CD processes based on Jenkins. These processes lacked modern practices like GitOps, making it harder to maintain and scale infrastructure. As a result, they faced increasing challenges with:
- Scalability and maintainability of infrastructure
- Manual deployment processes and lack of visibility
- Difficulty onboarding new teams into the development pipeline
Proposed solution & architecture
Unified Techs led a full-scale migration to AWS, delivering a GitOps-driven, cloud-native DevOps architecture built around AWS EKS, Terraform, GitHub Actions and Argo CD.
Infrastructure as Code with Terraform
- Provisioned all AWS infrastructure using Terraform, including VPC networking, EKS clusters and managed node groups, IAM roles and policies, and logging and monitoring integrations
- Developed modular, reusable Terraform code to ensure consistency across environments and support future scalability
CI/CD Modernization
- Replaced the client's monolithic Jenkins pipelines with a modern, GitHub Actions-based CI process
- Introduced matrix-based test automation, Dockerized build workflows with cache optimization, and integrated code quality checks and artifact publishing
- Implemented a GitOps approach with Argo CD to drive automated Kubernetes deployments directly from source control
GitOps with Argo CD & Helm
- Refactored applications into Helm charts
- Used Argo CD to automatically sync changes from Git repositories to EKS, manage versioned deployments across dev, staging and production environments, and enforce RBAC policies with health checks and monitoring
- Made release processes more predictable, auditable and aligned with industry best practices
Seamless Migration Strategy
- Designed a phased migration approach, starting with low-risk services and progressing to mission-critical workloads
- Achieved minimal downtime while following AWS security and reliability best practices
Architecture
Outcomes
- Reduced deployment time from hours to minutes
- GitOps workflows enabled clear, auditable release processes
- Improved infrastructure scalability and reusability with Terraform
- Enhanced developer velocity with simplified CI/CD pipelines
- Zero-downtime cutover for critical production services
Technologies used
FAQ
What AWS services were used in this engagement?
The engagement ran on AWS EKS with Terraform-provisioned VPC networking, managed node groups and IAM roles, plus CloudWatch for logging and monitoring. GitHub Actions and Argo CD drove the CI/CD and GitOps layers.
How was downtime avoided during the migration?
The migration was phased, starting with low-risk services and progressing to mission-critical workloads. That approach achieved a zero-downtime cutover for critical production services.
What were the measurable outcomes?
Deployment time fell from hours to minutes, releases became auditable through GitOps workflows, and the production cutover completed with zero downtime.