ECS to GKE Migration POC
AWS to GCP GKE Migration
Current State vs Target State
Migration Pros
Financial Benefits
- Immediate: $175k credits available ($75k now + $100k mid-2026)
- Cost Savings
- Predictable Costs: Credits provide budget certainty through 2026
Operational Advantages
- Team already experienced with GKE (dev/QA environments)
- Existing IaC scripts enable 2-hour end-to-end deployment
- All environments on same platform / Can be isolated easily
- Single cloud provider to manage
Technical Benefits
- Native Kubernetes: GKE offers superior K8s experience vs ECS
- Better Autoscaling: More granular scaling options - Already completed POC on how can we manage resource and the limits for individual workloads as needed, this can directly be managed from jenkins itself.
- Integrated Monitoring: Already setup Signoz with GCP workloads and can be done similarly for prod.
Migration Cons
- AWS CloudWatch is super clean to monitor when compared to gcp monitoring but is manageable.
- GCP Resource Quotas sometimes becomes blockers for urgent resource deployments
- We would be transitioning from ECS to GKE, where when compared from peer to peer pricing of resources, for GKE we need to pay 75$/mo for kubernetes master node maintenance charges which are fixed.
- Load Balancer Differences: ALB vs GCP Load Balancer configuration changes (Managable) - Will Cost higher as the setups for k8 would require multiple load balancers. [We can make changes to architecture, still networking with GKE would cost us higher with shared LB with ingress]
Security & Compliance Considerations
SOC 2 Requirements
Maintained Capabilities:
- VPC network isolation equivalent to AWS VPC
- IAM roles and policies (Cloud IAM)
- Encryption at rest and in transit
- Audit logging (Cloud Audit Logs)
- Access controls and monitoring
Security Enhancements
- Workload Identity: Secure pod-to-GCP service authentication (TBD but can be implemented, while ECS do have service mesh)
- VPC Service Controls: Additional network security layer
- Cloud Security Command Center: Centralized security insights
Compliance Considerations
- GCP maintains SOC 2 Type II certification
- Cloud SQL automatic encryption and backup
- Network security groups equivalent functionality
- Audit trail continuity must be planned
Performance Impact
Expected Improvements
- GKE rolling updates vs ECS deployment time (More control than ECS)
- Similar global infrastructure
Potential Concerns
- Initial Migration Performance: Temporary impact during transition
- Network Latency: Minimal difference in most regions
- Database Performance: Cloud SQL vs RDS comparable
Migration Effort Estimate
Low Effort (Existing Assets)
- GKE cluster deployment ✅
- Application containerization ✅
- Database migration scripts ✅
- IaC automation ✅
- Quotas and Limits Management
Risk Mitigation
Migration Strategy
- Blue-Green Deployment: Parallel environments during transition
- Database Replication: Real-time sync before cutover
- Rollback Plan: Maintain AWS environment for 3-4 days post-migration