Modernizing Legacy PHP Infrastructure on AWS for a Marketing Insights Platform
A legacy PHP platform was modernized into a scalable AWS environment with containerization, CI/CD, observability, and managed support — improving reliability, operational efficiency, and readiness for future growth.
Powering Smarter Marketing Operations
This solution supported a Netherlands-based business in the marketing insights space, helping brands better understand their audiences, enhance customer experience, and improve business performance through data-led services and insight-driven platforms. As the business grew, it needed a more scalable and dependable cloud foundation to strengthen reliability, improve operational efficiency, and support long-term platform evolution.
Overcoming Legacy Infrastructure Limits
The platform was running on a legacy PHP application hosted on standalone Amazon EC2 instances, supported by a traditional MySQL database. The environment lacked the flexibility and resilience required for modern operations, with no autoscaling, self-healing, Infrastructure as Code, automated CI/CD pipelines, or centralized monitoring. As a result, the platform faced higher operational overhead, limited scalability, and increased risk to uptime, performance, and future growth.
Engineering a Managed, Serverless-Augmented Ecosystem
Transitioning from standalone virtual machines to a highly available, containerized AWS architecture powered by automated CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure Modernization & Containerization
The legacy setup was replaced by a scalable AWS platform, migrating the application from virtual machines to Amazon ECS for containerized deployment, which enabled autoscaling and self-healing capabilities. Terraform was implemented to manage the environment dynamically as Infrastructure as Code.
Database & Performance Optimization
The data layer was modernized by migrating from a self-managed MySQL database to Amazon Aurora for MySQL, ensuring higher availability. Performance was further enhanced using Amazon ElastiCache to reduce database load, while Amazon SQS was introduced to decouple background jobs and smooth out traffic spikes.
DevOps & Continuous Delivery
Standardized delivery was achieved through Amazon CodeCatalyst CI/CD pipelines, automating the build, test, and deployment processes. Operations and security were strengthened using Amazon CloudWatch for centralized monitoring, alongside Amazon GuardDuty and Inspector for threat detection and vulnerability scanning
Transforming a rigid legacy system into an agile, cost-effective engine capable of handling dynamic traffic spikes
with a targeted 35% reduction in operational costs.
Predictable Cost Reductions
The modernization effort established an ongoing target to reduce operational costs by 35% through rightsizing, auto-scaling, and utilizing managed services.
Enhanced Reliability & Scalability
The system successfully gained the ability to scale automatically to handle peak loads and traffic spikes, vastly improving application uptime and service availability.
Accelerated Deployment Cycles
The integration of automated pipelines led to a higher deployment frequency with significantly reduced release failures and deployment issues.
Streamlined Operations
Centralized monitoring enabled faster incident detection and resolution, which decreased manual maintenance costs and overall support overhead.
