This is a case study on how we (Octopus Deploy) migrated our SaaS product from Windows VMs to Kubernetes.

When we launched our SaaS product, each customer received a dedicated Windows VM, which proved very costly and had many scalability issues. Kubernetes appeared to be the best option, but getting to Kubernetes was the real challenge.

This session will discuss the entire journey of our migration endeavor, from the nine-month conversion phase to the ongoing challenges encountered in the post-migration landscape. Topics discussed will be migrating existing customers, cloud infrastructure, creating efficient deployment strategies, and fine-tuning resource allocation to align with individual customer usage patterns.

With our new managed services architecture and Kubernetes, we are able to easily onboard 100s of new customers per month with little to no adjustments to our platform.

Key Takeaways for Attendees:
- Insights into the rationale behind transitioning from EC2 instances to Kubernetes.
- The rationale behind opting for managed services for our database and file storage needs.
- Challenges encountered during the transition from hosting on Windows to a Linux-based container environment.
- Navigating deployment challenges, leveraging "dogfooding" strategies, and implementing release rings.
- Techniques for dynamically adjusting CPU and RAM resources based on customer usage metrics.

The target audience for this talk is someone aware of kubernetes basics, such as nodes, containers, and namespaces, but not an expert. It is designed for anyone who has been a developer, operations, or platform engineer for with 2+ years of industry experience.