Success Story
20 months modernizing Sytex's multi-tenant platform: from legacy EKS to cloud-native with GitOps, GDPR-ready European expansion and Graviton FinOps
Sytex is an AI SaaS platform for field operations management: it lets telecom, energy and utility companies digitize and automate their field projects. It serves customers such as Claro, Telefónica/Movistar, IHS, DT and Brisanet, with more than 12 active tenants. Over 20 months of continuous work, Craftech modernized its infrastructure, enabled its expansion into Europe with GDPR compliance, and reduced its costs.
12+
tenants with independent GitOps deployments
20 months
of continuous work (assessment + DevOps Team)
Challenge
Sytex ran on an EKS cluster with no GitOps, no efficient autoscaling, Nginx ingress and manual secret management. Simultaneous deployments across more than 12 tenants caused downtime. The platform lacked centralized observability, a tested disaster recovery plan and a reliable deployment pipeline. At the same time, the arrival of European customers demanded dedicated, GDPR-compliant infrastructure, and infrastructure costs were scaling out of control (23 TB of unanalyzed inter-AZ traffic was identified).
Solution
Craftech carried out a full rearchitecture of the EKS stack: a new cluster (Kubernetes 1.33) with Karpenter replacing node groups and Spot instances, an ALB controller replacing Nginx, External Secrets, ArgoCD for GitOps with an App of Apps pattern —enabling independent, controlled per-tenant deployments— and a Prometheus/Loki/Grafana observability stack, plus separating the Celery workers to scale them on their own. It migrated production from N. Virginia to Ohio (us-east-2) —Aurora MySQL, Amazon OpenSearch, ECR and all workloads— for its better historical availability, and deployed dedicated infrastructure in Frankfurt (eu-central-1) under the same architecture with Oneleet/GDPR controls for European customers. It added a FinOps program: Graviton ARM64 across all environments, Aurora I/O Optimized, 100% EC2 Spot with Karpenter, Valkey and Elasticsearch reservations, and inter-AZ traffic analysis with VPC Flow Logs + Athena. It validated a disaster recovery drill and closed out with delivery of the Terraform IaC, architecture diagrams and training.
Results
Sytex was left with a modernized EKS platform with GitOps, independent per-tenant deployments and full observability. It enabled its expansion into the European market with GDPR-compliant infrastructure in Frankfurt and removed its dependency on N. Virginia, a region with a history of incidents. The FinOps program —Graviton ARM64, Aurora I/O Optimized, EC2 Spot and instance reservations— reduced infrastructure costs. Disaster recovery was validated through a drill, and the Sytex team was left autonomous with the Terraform IaC delivered and training completed.
Stack & technologies
