From a Single Server to Scalable Kubernetes: Lessons Learned Migrating a Travel Agency to AWS

This talk is a real-world case study of migrating a production travel agency website from a single on-premise server to a scalable, secure, and cost-optimized AWS and Kubernetes (EKS) architecture.

Starting from a legacy PHP application running on a single machine, we’ll walk through the technical and organizational challenges we faced during the migration: designing a cloud-native architecture, containerizing a PHP-FPM application, introducing Kubernetes without overengineering, and avoiding common AWS mistakes that can quickly lead to unexpected costs.

The session focuses on practical decisions, lessons learned, and trade-offs made along the way. We’ll cover how we made the application horizontally scalable on EKS, enabled fast and safe deployments, improved security and reliability, and optimized costs while still allowing the platform to grow with the business.

Attendees will leave with concrete guidance they can apply to their own migrations, especially if they are moving legacy workloads to Kubernetes for the first time.