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Legacy systems have a way of sneaking up on you. What starts as a stable, predictable setup can slowly turn into an outdated, rigid architecture that holds your entire company hostage. Recently, I found myself staring at such a legacy system one that had been limping along on old AWS infrastructure and demanded a modern transformation. Here’s how a single checkbox nearly derailed the entire project and what I learned from this adventure.
The Situation: Legacy AWS Setup That Refused to Scale
I was tasked with migrating a legacy Ruby on Rails app from an aging AWS infrastructure setup to a modern, scalable architecture. The system had a lot of history, and like many legacy environments, it was riddled with hardcoded configurations, outdated AMIs, and manual deployment processes.
The app was hosted on EC2 instances without auto-scaling, with a database that had grown to a point where any query threatened to grind the entire system to a halt. It was time for a change, enter Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and a containerized approach with ECS.
Step 1: Terraform to the Rescue
One of my first moves was to bring Terraform into the picture. Rebuilding infrastructure manually was a no-go; we needed…
