About the Author

This article outlines our experience migrating workloads from an on-premises data center to the AWS Cloud, culminating in the decommissioning of our last server in December 2024. The migration focused on our Motion Data product, which leverages geo-information analytics from Deutsche Telekom's mobile network to provide anonymized mass movement insights for industries such as retail, tourism, and public transport. Our transition to AWS was driven by rising colocation costs and the need to modernize our infrastructure, which faced limitations due to outdated technology constraints, high maintenance efforts, and inefficient storage and compute resource management. We selected AWS's Replatforming approach to harness managed services, improve scalability, and replace legacy Hadoop infrastructure with a more flexible Spark-on-Kubernetes and S3-based solution. The migration delivered key benefits, including 35% lower infrastructure costs, access to up-to-date technology stacks, and removal of resource constraints for compute workloads. By leveraging AWS-managed services such as Kubernetes (EKS), EMR, and RDS, we optimized performance, simplified operations, and positioned ourselves for future growth and innovation in cloud-native environments.