How to Plan and Execute Cloud Migration at Scale: Porter's Journey from AWS to GCP

Intro:

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In an exclusive webinar hosted by Facets Cloud, we explored transformative insights from a successful large-scale cloud migration with Ankit, VP of Engineering at Porter. This article captures key insights from their strategic journey from AWS to GCP, highlighting how unexpected challenges led to organizational evolution and technical innovation.

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About Porter:

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Porter, one of India's top logistics companies, operates in 22 cities and two international markets. Serving 11.5 crore customers with 7.5 lakh driver partners, they offer services from two-wheeler deliveries to house movers.

Their 250+ engineers manage a complex tech stack including Kotlin, Ruby on Rails, Kafka, and MySQL.

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Featured Tech Leader:

VP of Engineering at Porter, Ankit leads a 125+ engineering team after building mission-critical systems at Amazon Pay and Myntra. His expertise spans from scaling distributed systems to transforming engineering organizations.

What You'll Learn:

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Strategic approaches to cloud migration at scale

• How losing a cloud service partner became a catalyst for self-reliance
• Why conventional migration approaches sometimes need to be challenged 
• How to balance team autonomy with migration speed: critical technical decisions that shaped the migration's success 
• Practical insights for leaders planning similar migrations
• Post-migration optimization strategies

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Why This Matters:

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For technology leaders planning cloud migrations, the journey often seems straightforward: engage partners, follow established playbooks, and execute. 

However, real-world migrations rarely follow the textbook approach. This story offers valuable insights for organizations facing similar challenges, especially those dealing with:

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• Legacy systems that are built over time.
• Serving real-time critical workloads.
• Complex organizational dynamics 
• Ambitious modernization goals 
• Cost optimization imperatives

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Migration Context And The Story After:

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When Porter, a rapidly growing logistics platform, initiated their cloud migration, the stakes were significant. With millions of users depending on their services and hundreds of microservices to migrate, every decision carried weight.
Their journey began with familiar objectives—infrastructure cost optimization and software delivery lifecycle modernization—but evolved into a masterclass in building self-reliant capabilities.

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"The higher the skin in the game, the higher the commitment and better the results."

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Technical Landscape and Challenges:

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Porter's technical landscape reflected the complexity familiar to many growing organizations: a decade-old Ruby on Rails monolith, gradually surrounded by over 100 microservices written in Kotlin. Their data layer handled millions of queries per second, with a MySQL database that had grown to hundreds of terabytes. The system was stable but showed the architectural decisions of different eras—exactly the kind of complexity that made their cloud partners nervous.

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Expectations Vs. Reality :

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The migration started with a traditional approach: engaging recommended cloud service partners, following standard patterns, and planning for single-phase execution. However, two significant challenges emerged: their asset footprint had grown 40% during the planning phase alone, and their initial partner's estimated budget proved insufficient for their scale.

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"At some point it felt like a crazy call, but it turned out to be a brave call."

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And The Pivot :

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Instead of seeking another full-service partner, Porter made a strategic decision to own the migration while hiring individual developers from partner companies. This approach required rapidly building expertise in:

• Kubernetes orchestration
• Infrastructure as Code with Terraform
• Modern CI/CD practices with ArgoCD
• Cloud-native architecture patterns

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The Power of Phased Migration:

Despite cloud providers advocating for single-phase migrations, Porter chose a three-phase approach that proved transformative:

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1. Learning Phase: Starting with newer, less critical services

2. Momentum Phase: Covering moderate-scale applications

3. Core Migration: Handling high-traffic critical services

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"What took nine days in the first batch was accomplished in half a day by the final batch."

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Some Technical Deep Dives:

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Database Migration Innovation

Porter developed a multi-region migration strategy that significantly reduced their migration window. Their approach focused on regional proximity and internal network optimizations, maintaining data consistency while minimizing transfer times.

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Automation Evolution

One of the most striking transformations was their cutover process evolution. What began as high-stress events requiring manual coordination across war rooms evolved into automated, monitored processes.

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"When I enter a room during our final cutover and ask 'What's going on?', the team is yawning. Everything is automated now—just scripts executing with a click of a button. Compare this to our first migration where everyone was tense, focused, and executing manual steps every few minutes. That's when you know your automation is working—when your cutovers become boring."

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Lessons That Stayed With Porter:

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The most valuable insights from our journey weren't about technical tools or cloud features—they were about organizational capability and control:

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• Own Your Journey: While partners can provide expertise, maintaining strategic control internally leads to better outcomes.
• Invest in Learning: What seems like slow progress initially accelerates dramatically as team capability grows.
• Embrace Iteration: Each phase should make the next one better. Perfect processes aren't built, they're evolved.
• Automate Progressively: Start with manual steps to understand the process, then automate incrementally.

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Platform Engineering Perspective:

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At Facets Cloud, we've observed that successful cloud migrations share common elements with effective platform engineering practices. Porter's journey exemplifies how organizations can use migration as an opportunity to build robust platform engineering capabilities:

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• Standardizing infrastructure provisioning
• Implementing developer self-service
• Establishing automated compliance
• Building reusable components

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Looking Ahead:

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For organizations planning cloud migrations, Porter's journey offers valuable insights into balancing partner expertise with internal capability building. Their experience demonstrates that successful cloud migration isn't just about moving workloads—it's about building lasting technical capabilities and organizational resilience.

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A Bit About Facets.Cloud:

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Planning your cloud migration journey? Explore how platform engineering can accelerate your cloud transformation. 

Check out Facets.cloud to see how our platform engineering solution can help standardize your cloud infrastructure and empower your development teams.

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This article is part of Facets Cloud's technical leadership series, where we explore real-world platform engineering and cloud transformation journeys.


Watch the complete webinar "Cloud Migration at Scale: Porter's Journey from AWS to GCP" for FREE here: Click here!