Digital Platform Transformation

A leading media publishing platform, one of India's largest and most trusted news organizations, was minutes away from disaster every time breaking news hit. Their digital platform served millions daily — but the backend was crumbling: ECS clusters choking during election results and live events; a 15-year-old on-premise Windows Server running the entire print-to-digital OCR pipeline — unpatched, single-point-of-failure, taking 4+ hours per edition; a monthly AWS bill hitting $9,000 with zero predictability; and manual deployments, self-managed databases, and open RDP ports everywhere. When the next national election cycle loomed, they knew: the old world wouldn't survive another traffic surge.

• ECS unable to scale beyond modest traffic.
• Legacy Windows 2008 server running ABBYY FineReader, in-house .NET editorial tools, and SQL Server 2012 — never patched, never backed up properly.
• Zero automation: every deployment was a 3-hour fire drill.
• Security posture that would make any auditor cry.
• $9,000/month being burned on over-provisioned VMs and forgotten resources.

We rebuilt the entire digital and editorial stack in under 14 weeks — keeping the Microsoft DNA their teams loved while delivering true cloud-native scale, security, and automation.

• 100% migration from ECS to Amazon EKS (managed Kubernetes).
• Horizontal Pod Autoscaler + KEDA event-driven scaling.
• Proven live: 138,000+ concurrent users with under 10-second end-to-end latency during peak events.

• The entire 15-year-old print-to-digital pipeline was lifted-and-shifted then modernized on a Windows Server 2025 EC2 fleet (t3a.medium + m5.large).
• ABBYY FineReader OCR, .NET Framework 4.8 editorial dashboards, and internal SQL Server 2022 databases all run natively.
• Shared Amazon EFS provides cross-instance file access for PDFs, images, and archives.
• Daily immutable golden AMIs + Auto Scaling groups.
• OCR processing time slashed from 4–6 hours to under 45 minutes, with 100% uptime.

• Automated Windows patching via Patch Manager — 100% compliance, zero manual RDP.
• Session Manager + RDP Gateway for secure, audited, bastion-less admin access — port 3389 never exposed.
• Run Command executes PowerShell fixes across the entire Windows fleet in seconds.
• Inventory & State Manager enforce configuration compliance.

• Legacy editorial databases requiring SQL Server-specific features remain on EC2 SQL Server 2022 with synchronous Multi-AZ mirroring.
• New workloads use Amazon RDS PostgreSQL Multi-AZ + read replicas.
• Full compatibility path preserved — no forced rewrite.

• AWS Managed Microsoft AD serves as the single source of truth.
• All journalists, editors, and DevOps team members use existing corporate AD credentials for AWS Console and tool access.
• PowerShell + AWS Tools for PowerShell scripts are deeply embedded in CI/CD and daily operations.

• ArgoCD manages declarative state for both EKS pods and Windows EC2 Auto Scaling groups from the same Git repos.
• Drift detection, self-healing, and one-click rollback — even for Windows configurations.
• Jenkins + Helm + Bitbucket pipeline with full testing and blue-green deployments.

• AWS WAF + Shield Advanced + GuardDuty.
• Secrets Manager with 90-day auto-rotation, injected into both Windows services and EKS pods.
• TLS everywhere, KMS encryption at rest, CloudTrail + quarterly IAM/AD reviews.
• Zero high/critical security findings post-launch.

CloudWatch + Prometheus + Grafana + OpenSearch, with custom alerts for OCR queue length, Windows disk pressure, and WAF blocks — all pushed to Slack. One-pane-of-glass visibility across Linux containers and Windows instances.

• Full stack (EKS + Windows EC2 + RDS) rebuildable in a secondary region in under 30 minutes.
• Quarterly DR drills using ArgoCD + Jenkins — passed every time.
• RTO under 5 minutes, RPO under 30 seconds.

• Parallel run of old and new stacks for 72 hours.
• DNS flip via Akamai — zero user impact.
• The Windows OCR pipeline failed over with Session Manager live migration — not a single newspaper edition delayed.

• Handled 138,000+ concurrent users during live election coverage.
• OCR pipeline processed over 2,500 pages/hour without breaking a sweat.
• Windows fleet patched automatically mid-campaign — zero downtime.
• End-to-end latency under 10 seconds even at peak.
• Uptime: 99.999%+.

• Monthly cost dropped from $9,000 to $6,000 — a 33% reduction, $36,000/year saved.
• Incident response time cut by more than 50%.
• Editorial teams now focus 100% on journalism — infrastructure just works.
• Windows admins went from firefighting to automating.
• First time in 15 years the print-to-digital pipeline has zero single points of failure.