This is a case study of how we migrated our SaaS product from dedicated Windows VMs to a scalable, containerized Kubernetes environment.

Initially, every customer ran on their own Windows VM—an expensive and inflexible setup that quickly became a bottleneck to growth. Kubernetes offered a compelling alternative, but the migration was far from simple.

We’ll walk through the whole arc of this transformation: a nine-month migration process, the hurdles of transitioning legacy workloads, and the operational challenges we faced post-migration.

This talk will discuss:
- Why we moved from EC2-hosted Windows VMs to Kubernetes and how we made it work.
- How managed services simplified our database and file storage operations.
- Lessons learned from switching to a Linux-based containerized environment.
- Deployment strategies that included internal “dogfooding” and phased release rings.
- Methods for fine-tuning CPU and memory allocation based on real-time usage patterns.

Thanks to our new Kubernetes-based architecture and managed cloud services, we can onboard hundreds of new customers weekly with minimal effort or disruption.

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.