Case Study - Twenty-one sites, six stacks, one cutover

Overview

The platform runs 21 individual sites written across six programming languages and frameworks, hosting thousands of hours of on-demand video: live broadcasts, archival footage and media assets in multiple languages and formats.

The complication was not the size of it. These sites sit at the centre of global diplomacy, carry extraordinary visibility, and take heavy, unpredictable traffic. Their importance meant the migration had to happen as a single cutover, so there was no phased fallback and no partial state to retreat to.

What we did

In under three months we replatformed all 21 sites to a container-native sovereign cloud, integrating the various data sources and legacy systems into one flexible model.

A migration lead designed the approach and worked directly with the client to debug and fix the application errors that surfaced as environments changed. That is where most of the risk in a move like this lives. Senior project management held the stakeholder side and the dependencies between sites. The resulting platform was documented in full, so the institution was not left dependent on us to understand what it now runs.

The outcome

All 21 sites went live without downtime. Within weeks the organisation retired its legacy platform entirely, removing the operational overhead and the long-standing risks that came with it.

The new platform absorbs traffic surges, which tend to arrive around major international events, without performance degradation, and serves audiences across several continents faster than before. The institution also gained a more predictable cloud-native cost model and the ability to add future editorial and media services without vendor lock-in.