Open-source infrastructure migration

CHALLENGE

A high-tech manufacturing company had built its infrastructure on a stack of proprietary platforms over several years. Each had been chosen for a reason at the time, but together they had become a licensing treadmill — costs rising every renewal cycle, with no corresponding increase in capability. The total licensing bill had crept to thousands per month across compute orchestration, storage management, backup, and monitoring components.

The deeper problem was control. Every change, every integration, every customization required a support ticket to a vendor — or a professional-services engagement billed at enterprise rates. The infrastructure team had stopped being engineers and become license administrators. They wanted their infrastructure back.

APPROACH

The migration was planned as a capability-for-capability replacement, not a rip-and-replace. Each proprietary component was mapped to an open-source equivalent that matched or exceeded its function, then migrated one at a time with parallel running to verify parity before cutover. Codyssey embedded with the customer infrastructure team, defined the target architecture and the hard calls on platform selection, data migration, and rollback, while transferring runbook and operational ownership to the team. Architecture decision records and migration runbooks were captured in the customer knowledge base so the team could own and extend the open-source stack. Codyssey stayed responsible for the architecture and the hard calls; the customer team took ownership of routine operations and continuous improvement. The approach had four pillars:

• Compute orchestration — proprietary container platform replaced with a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster, managed with standard tooling.
• Storage management — proprietary storage appliance layer replaced with a self-hosted Ceph cluster, preserving performance and redundancy.
• Backup and recovery — proprietary backup suite replaced with Proxmox Backup Server, with verified restore tests before decommissioning the old system.
• Monitoring — proprietary monitoring folded into the existing Zabbix and Grafana stack, consolidating tooling rather than adding another silo.

SOLUTION

The migration was executed component by component, with each proprietary system running in parallel alongside its open-source replacement until parity was verified. The Kubernetes cluster was stood up first — compute orchestration was the foundation everything else depended on. Workloads were migrated in waves, starting with stateless services and moving to stateful ones once the storage layer was validated under load.

The storage layer — Ceph — was validated under load before any production data moved. Backup and recovery was the last cutover — and the most carefully tested, because a backup you can't restore is worse than no backup at all. Every restore path was verified against real data before the proprietary backup suite was decommissioned.

Monitoring was consolidated rather than merely replaced. The proprietary monitoring that remained from the old stack was folded into the Zabbix and Grafana deployment already running from a prior engagement, reducing tool sprawl rather than just swapping one vendor for another.

OUTCOME

The licensing bill dropped by $8,360/month, measured against the actual post-migration operating costs. Zero capabilities were lost; every function the proprietary stack provided is matched or exceeded by its open-source replacement. The infrastructure team regained full control — changes that used to require a vendor support ticket are now made in-house, often within the same day.

The migration paid for itself within the first quarter of operation. The ongoing savings go back into the manufacturing side of the business, where they belong.

The customer infrastructure team now fully owns and improves the open-source stack, supported by a knowledge base of runbooks, architecture decision records, and migration playbooks. Codyssey remains responsible for the architecture and the hard calls around platform selection and major changes, while the customer team handles routine operations. The migration also reduced operational risk: with full control and documented procedures, the team can respond to incidents proactively rather than waiting on vendor support.

Beyond the balance sheet, the cultural shift was just as significant. The infrastructure team went from waiting on vendor roadmaps to shaping their own. When a new requirement emerged, they built for it — no procurement cycle, no licensing negotiation, no waiting for a feature that might ship in the next major release. That autonomy, more than the monthly savings, is what made the migration worth doing.

"We stopped being license administrators and started being engineers again. The savings are great — but getting control back is what actually changed how we work."— Infrastructure Manager, anonymized

STACK

Self-hosted Kubernetes (compute orchestration) · Ceph (distributed storage) · Proxmox Backup Server (backup with verified restore) · Zabbix + Grafana (monitoring, consolidated) · Fully self-hosted, no vendor lock-in