Challenges
A major European digital commerce and affiliate marketing network ran a very different kind of estate: 1,347 servers running a single operating system - Debian Linux - built and scaled in the datacenter over many years. The uniformity was deceptive. With hundreds of near-identical servers, traditional tooling could not answer the questions that matter for migration: which servers form which application, what depends on what, and what would move together.
Behind the fleet sat one of the largest open-source database footprints CloudHound has assessed, plus a substantial containerized workload layer that also needed a home in AWS.
Solution
CloudHound delivered a continuous, agent-based assessment running live across the entire estate for over four months:
- Full-fleet agent coverage: CloudHound agents were deployed to all 1,347 Debian servers, streaming utilization and network telemetry continuously rather than sampling a point in time.
- Dependency mapping at scale: More than 936,000 unique network connections were captured and analyzed across the estate.
- Automated application grouping: CloudHound's network analysis resolved the uniform-looking fleet into 43 discrete application groups, giving each cluster of servers a clear identity and migration path.
- Open-source database introspection: 275 database servers were discovered - 217 MariaDB, 49 MySQL, and 9 PostgreSQL - and assessed for modernization to Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora.
- Container workload assessment: Nearly 2,700 containers were analyzed in companion assessments, extending migration planning beyond virtual machines to the platform's containerized services.
- Cost optimization modeling: Right-sizing recommendations were built from months of observed utilization and modeled against Compute Savings Plans and reserved pricing constructs.
Results
- 1,347 servers - an entire single-platform Linux estate - analyzed with live agents.
- Over 936,000 unique network connections captured and mapped.
- 43 application groupings isolated automatically from a fleet of near-identical servers.
- 275 open-source database servers discovered and mapped to RDS and Aurora modernization targets.
- Nearly 2,700 containers assessed alongside the server estate for a complete migration picture.
Conclusion
Uniform infrastructure does not mean simple migration - it means the complexity is hidden in the connections. CloudHound's continuous agent-based analysis gave this digital commerce leader the application-level clarity its identical-looking fleet could not provide on paper, together with a modernization pathway for one of the largest open-source database estates CloudHound has seen.
