Hygiena's Acquia hosting had reached $136,000 a year — with visit caps, 90-minute build times, and no meaningful control over the infrastructure layer. We migrated to a self-managed AKS platform in 21 days, completed the cutover in one week with zero disruption, and reduced annual costs by 68%.
The starting point
Hygiena's web platform was running on Acquia's managed PaaS. It delivered — but the constraints were accumulating. The annual bill had reached $136,000, with $24,000 in monthly overage charges on top. Build times ran up to 90 minutes. Visit caps meant traffic spikes required manual intervention. And because the infrastructure layer was fully managed by Acquia, there was no meaningful ability to optimise, scale selectively, or control costs.
The platform itself — a headless Drupal/Next.js stack we had delivered in 2023 — was solid. The infrastructure it ran on had become the constraint.
The approach
Before writing a line of infrastructure code, we mapped what we were dealing with. What did the workloads actually look like? What were the real resource profiles? What would the Azure cost model look like at various capacity levels? What were the risks in a live cutover for a global production platform?
The output was a written architecture document with a prioritised delivery plan. That document set the order of everything that followed — and gave Hygiena's leadership a clear picture of the financial and operational case before any commitment was made.
The execution
The AKS platform was designed and built from scratch. High availability across two Azure availability zones. Namespaced environments for dev, staging and production, with scale-to-zero for non-production workloads. The full application stack — Drupal PHP-FPM, Next.js, Apache Solr, Varnish and Redis — containerised and deployed with co-located services, eliminating the ISR build constraints of the Acquia environment.
Azure Key Vault, Container Registry, Application Gateway, Azure Front Door and Azure Monitor were integrated across the stack. Security was implemented in layers: Cilium network policy, RBAC, Entra ID integration and automated SSL/TLS via cert-manager. ArgoCD was deployed as the GitOps engine. Istio as the service mesh for traffic management, mTLS and telemetry. Prometheus and Grafana for real-time observability and alerting.
The production cutover was completed in one week with zero customer-facing disruption. Traffic was shifted progressively, with full rollback capability at every stage.
The result
Annual hosting costs dropped from $136,000 to approximately $46,000 — a 68% reduction. The $24,000 in monthly overage charges was eliminated entirely. Build times fell from up to 90 minutes to under 10 minutes. The platform now runs with no visit caps, no hard resource ceilings, and double the compute resources at a fraction of the previous cost.
Projected savings over three years: $207,500 against the legacy Acquia setup.
The engagement continues as an ongoing retainer covering infrastructure management, platform evolution and new product development.
If you are looking for a professional, reliable and certified DevOps partner who delivers quickly, saves money and feels like an extension of your own team, I highly recommend Leslie.
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