Cloud infrastructure · Cost
AWS to Alibaba Cloud Migration
A Kubernetes estate moved between clouds for a 40–50% lower bill, with minutes of downtime.
40–50%lower monthly cost (est.)
The challenge
AWS costs were climbing. The move to Alibaba Cloud covered compute, managed PostgreSQL, Redis, VPC and VPN networking, and every security policy around them.
How it works
- 01
Cost analysis
Mapped every AWS service to its Alibaba equivalent (EC2 to ECS, RDS to ApsaraDB, S3 to OSS, IAM to RAM) and built a per-pod cost plan.
- 02
Setup
Provisioned VPC, security groups and the Kubernetes cluster, plus a tunnel between clouds for the transition. Mirrored IAM, network rules, RBAC, bucket and database policies, encryption, SSL, observability and routing.
- 03
Per-pod migration plans
Pre-, during- and post-migration steps for every pod, with capacity planning, a rollback plan and a shared backup strategy.
- 04
Cutover
A nightly window behind a maintenance page. Verify the new infrastructure, rotate credentials in Vault, migrate the database and Redis, scale down AWS, deploy, repoint DNS, confirm traffic in observability, then run smoke and integration tests.
Engineering decisions
Kubernetes made the move portable
- Manifests, Helm charts, services and ConfigMaps moved as-is. Only the underlying metal changed.
Database: replication vs dump-and-restore
- Managed replication (DTS/DMS) offers minimal downtime and live validation, but adds cost, WAL and network setup, and requires a schema freeze.
- Dump-and-restore with pg_dump/pg_restore is simple, free and point-in-time consistent, at the price of a planned downtime window.
Redis and assets
- Redis moved as an RDB snapshot, verified by comparing DBSIZE and keyspace before switching.
- S3 assets were pre-synced to OSS with ossimport, re-run incrementally on cutover day, and every database-referenced file URL was validated afterwards.
Outcomes
- Estimated 40–50% reduction in monthly cloud spend.
- Cutover completed with 5–10 minutes of downtime.
- Security posture mirrored policy-for-policy, with rollback ready at every step.
Technology
- Kubernetes · Helm
- Portable workloads
- Alibaba Cloud ECS · ApsaraDB · OSS
- Target compute, database, storage
- PostgreSQL
- pg_dump / pg_restore
- Redis
- RDB snapshot migration
- VPN Gateway · RAM
- Networking and access
- ossimport
- S3 to OSS asset sync
Contact
Have something you want to build?
Tell us what you're building, or what you'd like to automate. Let's figure out the next step.