Replatform Migration from Hostinger and GCP to AWS

At the start of the engagement, the customer operated its production workloads across two separate infrastructure environments:

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• Virtualized servers hosted on Hostinger, and

• Cloud-based workloads running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Both environments hosted active, revenue-impacting production systems, with no clear separation of environments and limited governance consistency across platforms.

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This fragmented infrastructure model introduced significant operational and security challenges. Each environment was managed independently, with different tooling, configurations, and operational practices. There was no centralized governance model, no unified security baseline, and limited visibility across the full workload landscape. As the platform continued to grow, this fragmentation increased operational risk, complicated troubleshooting, and made it difficult to enforce consistent controls.

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From a security and governance perspective, the lack of standardization prevented the effective implementation of cloud best practices. A Well-Architected Review (CloudFit) conducted during the assessment phase identified multiple High Risk Items (HRIs) and Medium Risk Items (MRIs), primarily concentrated in the Operational Excellence and Security pillars. These risks were directly linked to:

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• Manual operational processes

• Limited observability and monitoring

• Inconsistent access controls and logging

• Absence of centralized governance mechanisms

In addition to technical and operational challenges, the customer faced a business-level constraint. The company did not have a trusted cloud partner supporting the evolution, optimization, and long-term roadmap of its workloads in Hostinger or GCP. This limited its ability to continuously improve the platform, adopt best practices, and proactively address risks as the business scaled.

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Given this context, a clear business need was defined to unify its dispersed production infrastructure under a single cloud platform, improving security posture, governance, and operational maturity, while ensuring business continuity. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was selected as the target platform to enable this consolidation and to establish a long-term partnership with Teracloud, providing ongoing guidance, operational support, and continuous improvement aligned with AWS best practices.

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Without addressing these challenges, the customer faced increasing operational complexity, security exposure, and scalability limitations, which would have directly impacted platform reliability and the company’s ability to sustainably grow its services.

Migration Strategy and Replatform Approach

Based on the challenges identified during the assessment phase, the customer and Teracloud defined a set of clear business and technical objectives to guide the migration and modernization initiative. These objectives were established by working backwards from the desired operational maturity, security posture, and long-term sustainability of the platform.

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As part of the planning phase, multiple migration strategies within the AWS 7Rs framework were evaluated, including rehost, replatform, and refactor. A replatform (lift, tinker, and shift) approach was selected as the most appropriate strategy, as it enabled the customer to modernize its application architecture through the adoption of AWS managed services, such as Amazon ECS, without requiring a full application rewrite.

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This approach allowed the customer to achieve faster time to value while reducing migration risk, preserving core application functionality, and establishing a modern and scalable AWS foundation. Migration and modernization activities were executed in a coordinated manner to ensure business continuity, while progressively enabling the adoption of AWS-native operational and security best practices.

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As a first step, Teracloud conducted a technical and operational discovery process to assess existing infrastructure, workloads, and operational processes. This discovery phase followed a standardized and repeatable methodology, combining an automated assessment tool (CloudFit) with structured discovery workshops.

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CloudFit leverages a custom lens built on the AWS Well-Architected Tool, developed by Teracloud and aligned with the AWS Well-Architected Framework. This methodology provided a consistent and objective mechanism to evaluate workloads across multiple architectural dimensions, including architecture, operations, security, and performance.

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The discovery process enabled the establishment of a clear baseline of the current-state environment, the identification of operational and security risks, and the prioritization of improvement opportunities directly aligned with the selected migration and modernization strategy. These findings were further complemented with information gathered during the project scoping phase and were formally documented in the Statement of Work (SoW).

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Customer Goals and Objectives

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The primary business objective of the engagement was to consolidate all production workloads previously distributed across Hostinger and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) into a single, governed AWS environment, improving security, governance, and operational consistency.

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This primary objective was complemented by additional goals:

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• Strengthen security and governance by aligning the platform with AWS Well-Architected best practices, particularly across the Operational Excellence and Security pillars.

• Reduce operational complexity by eliminating fragmented infrastructure and standardizing deployment, monitoring, and access control mechanisms.

• Ensure business continuity by migrating all production workloads without disrupting customer-facing services.

• Establish a long-term cloud operating model, supported by an AWS Partner, enabling continuous improvement, optimization, and platform evolution over time.

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From a technical perspective, the objectives included:

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• Migrating 100% of production workloads from Hostinger and GCP to AWS.

• Modernizing the execution environment through containerization and managed services, without introducing application-level rewrites.

• Adopting Amazon Aurora MySQL as the standard managed database platform, eliminating self-managed database operations.

• Implementing a multi-account AWS architecture to clearly separate production, staging, and development environments, improving isolation and governance.

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Migration Strategy Selection

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To achieve these objectives, a replatform migration strategy was selected within the AWS 7Rs framework.

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A pure rehost approach was discarded, as it would have replicated existing operational inefficiencies and governance gaps in AWS. At the same time, a full refactor was intentionally excluded to avoid introducing unnecessary risk, complexity, and extended timelines that were not required to meet the business goals.

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The replatform strategy enabled the customer to:

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• Preserve existing application functionality while introducing architectural and operational improvements.

• Standardize workloads using container-based deployments on AWS managed services.

• Improve reliability, security, and operational maturity without rewriting application code.

• ​Accelerate the consolidation of all environments into AWS while maintaining predictable execution and controlled risk.