The Terraform "Lift & Shift" Playbook: Migrating 200 Apps to Multi-Cloud with Terraform

Description

How do you migrate 200 applications from a data center to a multi-cloud environment in just one year? In this episode, Matthias Mertens, a Cloud Solution Architect at Helvetia Insurance Switzerland, shares a real-world case study of their rapid "lift and shift" migration to AWS and Azure. Matthias explains why this aggressive "lift and shift" approach was necessary to exit data center leases as fast as possible. He details how Terraform was the critical cloud-agnostic tool that made this automation possible, allowing them to create new, secure-by-default accounts in minutes and use modules to deploy hundreds of VMs. We also dive into a second project: a practical, production-grade, and serverless architecture for running a vendor's Docker container using ECS Fargate. Learn why they rejected running containers on VMs in production ("no way we would do that") and why Kubernetes was overkill for their needs. Questions asked: 00:00 Introduction 01:30 Who is Matthias Mertens? 01:55 The 200-App Data Center Migration to AWS & Azure 02:35 Why a Multi-Cloud Strategy? (AWS & Azure) 03:20 Choosing Terraform for Multi-Cloud Automation 04:30 The "Lift and Shift" Strategy: Why Speed Was Critical 06:30 How Terraform Modules Automated the 200-App Migration 08:30 Case Study 2: Running Vendor Docker Containers 09:00 Why Not VMs? Why Not Kubernetes? 09:50 The Serverless Solution: ECS Fargate 10:45 Challenges: Making Serverless "Production Grade" (Logs, Secrets, LB) 11:45 Advice for Starting Your Own Migration (Get a Partner!) 13:45 Fun Questions: Daughters & French Cuisine -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 📱Cloud Security Podcast Social Media📱 _____________________________________ 🛜 Website: https://cloudsecuritypodcast.tv/ 🧑🏾‍💻 Cloud Security Bootcamp - https://www.cloudsecuritybootcamp.com/ ✉️ Cloud Security Newsletter - https://www.cloudsecuritynewsletter.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/CloudSecPod LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/Cloud-security-podcast #cloudsecurity #terraform #hashicorp @HashiCorp