Post by Aayush Jain

Cloud Provider Migrations are no joke. Sometimes you’re running greenfield infrastructure while migrating brownfield applications. #askT went through all 6Rs of a cloud migration in record time. ☁️♻️ About 8 months ago, our team at #DTDL banded together to evolve Deutsche Telekom’s premier #AI workplace assistant. The mandate was clear: build a modern architecture to accelerate Time-to-Market and unlock advanced use cases our legacy setup couldn’t support. New cloud-provider, new microservices, new networking – while retaining the same data, same APIs, and same users. Complete feature parity with an enhanced experience, hot-swapped quietly over Christmas break. Now re-designed for super-sensitive data within #GDPR. 🔐 This ranks as one of the fastest migrations within Telekom – completed in under 2.5 months. With a rapidly growing user base and expanding features, a solid foundation was essential. 📈 We built a single-click infrastructure spin-up that installs Karpenter, ArgoCD, Networking, and auto-deploys applications in orchestrated waves. We pushed hard on stability & cost: running 90% of apps and 50% of GPUs on multi-architecture spot instances in production is no small feat. ⚙️💰 Strict #GitOps end-to-end wipes out manual changes, enforces proper SDLC, and keeps every environment as an exact infra-mirror. New components and security enhancements promote to prod confidently and as-is. 🔁 The last six months proved that technical debt is just the interest you pay on rushed decisions. Building a platform that scales automatically is technical; keeping it clean is cultural. Knowing the right tradeoffs – without hurting business priorities – is paramount. We used 2-way doors for experiments, deliberate 1-way doors for system design, and politely declined low-impact rework. ⚖️ The problems you never see are the result of meticulous upfront design. In cloud architecture, there are a hundred thousand ways things can go wrong. Quietly mitigating scenarios users & developers never encounter is an underrated gift to engineers. 🛡️🌱 Good platform engineering isn’t just cool tech – it’s a business multiplier. It buys back engineering hours and protects the bottom line. By investing early in a self-healing, automated platform, we didn’t just survive the migration – we set the gold standard for how #askT will scale for years to come. 🏆 Some efforts go a long way. Massive thanks to my platform engineering team – Ishaan, Sneha, and Nikhil – for keeping this platform live and breathing day and night. 🙌 And to the wider village: Hendrik, Abhishek, Kartik, Steffen, Philipp, Rajan, Saurabh, Daniel, Anshumali, Chandani, @varun, Chirag, Rahul and everyone who supported us. Proud of what we built together. 🚀 #PlatformEngineering #DevOps #CloudMigration #GitOps #DigitalTransformation #FinOps #EngineeringManagement #AWS #Kubernetes #DeveloperExperience #askT #AI #RAG #ArtificialIntelligence #PrivateAI