Tech With Manny Achieves Zero-Downtime Migration to AWS

The Challenge

Tech With Manny, a fast-growing tech content company producing educational videos and courses, was struggling with a monolithic platform running on-premise. The system was difficult to scale during peak course launches and live streaming events, leading to frequent outages and frustrated students. Deploying new features was a slow, risky process, taking weeks or even months, which hindered their ability to compete in the fast-moving edtech space. They needed to migrate to the cloud to improve scalability, performance, and development agility, but could not afford any downtime during the process.

The Solution

Our team partnered with Tech With Manny to execute a phased, zero-downtime migration to a microservices architecture on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Strangler Fig Pattern: We adopted the Strangler Fig pattern to gradually migrate functionality. We identified key business domains (e.g., Content Management, Video Streaming, User Analytics, Payment Processing) and began building new microservices for each. An Application Load Balancer (ALB) and API Gateway were used to route traffic to either the new microservice or the legacy monolith, allowing us to safely carve off pieces of the old system.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The entire AWS environment was defined using Terraform. This enabled us to create repeatable, version-controlled infrastructure for development, staging, and production environments, ensuring consistency and eliminating manual configuration errors.

Containerization with ECS: The new microservices were containerized using Docker and deployed on AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) with Fargate. Fargate abstracted away the need to manage the underlying EC2 instances, simplifying operations and improving security.

CI/CD Automation: We built a robust CI/CD pipeline using AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild. Every code commit automatically triggered a series of builds, unit tests, and security scans. Successful builds were then deployed to a staging environment for integration testing before a manual approval gate for production deployment.

Database Migration: The monolithic Oracle database was a major bottleneck. We used the AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) with ongoing replication to migrate the data to a combination of Amazon Aurora (for transactional data) and DynamoDB (for session and cart data), choosing the right database for the right workload.

The Results

The migration was completed over six months with zero customer-facing downtime. The results were transformative:

50% Improvement in Video Load Times: The new microservices architecture and cloud-native services significantly boosted platform performance.

10x Faster Deployments: The automated CI/CD pipeline reduced the deployment lead time from weeks to just a few hours.

Elastic Scalability: The platform now effortlessly handles traffic spikes during course launches, scaling horizontally in minutes to meet demand. During their largest product launch post-migration, they experienced 100% uptime despite a 300% increase in concurrent users.

25% Reduction in TCO: By moving to the cloud and optimizing resources, Tech With Manny reduced their total cost of ownership for the platform by 25% in the first year.