A technical assessment to take Lemon from ECS to Kubernetes, with NPS 9/10

Challenge

Lemon ran dozens of services on Amazon ECS across two regions, with Aurora MySQL and RDS clusters and CI/CD on GitHub Actions. Despite a functional architecture, there were clear frictions: high, loosely-controlled networking costs (~US$6,070/mo across Network Firewall, NAT Gateways, Client VPN and VPC Endpoints), a pipeline that could report success even when the container failed to start, limited Kubernetes knowledge on the team, only 1-day backup retention on the critical database, no VPC Flow Logs, and low observability maturity for the future Kubernetes layer.

Solution

Craftech ran a one-month comprehensive technical assessment led by Squad 2, covering six dimensions: networking (full mapping of VPCs, peerings and security rules), services (ECS inventory and a projected EKS diagram), databases (Aurora/RDS on Graviton, backup risks), CI/CD (GitHub Actions flow and a Canary/Blue-Green proposal with ArgoCD), observability (a Datadog cost strategy on EKS with VPC CNI Prefix) and security/enablement (IAM, secrets and an ArgoCD/Helm/EKS training plan for Lemon's team). Deliverables: assessment document, migration cost calculator, executive presentation, project plan and training plan.

Results

The assessment was completed within the agreed 30 days and presented to Lemon's technical and executive teams, with NPS 9/10 and 'Very Good' satisfaction. It documented ~US$6,070/mo of networking costs with concrete optimization opportunities, an EKS migration plan with projected architecture and estimates ready to execute, and critical risks identified (insufficient backup on the critical DB, overlapping CIDRs, missing VPC Flow Logs and the ECS pipeline limitation). The client advanced the plan to executive approval for the migration phase.