Modernizing legacy ingestion into an AWS-native data lake
Replaced brittle on-prem collectors and batch warehouses with governed S3 zones, automated cataloging, and serverless orchestration that deliver fresh data in minutes.
End-to-end latency
18h <45m
Legacy platform savings
$320K/year
Warehouse storage savings
$68K/year
Overview
Decades of organically grown extractors pushed data from more than a hundred applications through a bespoke collector into MySQL before nightly Airflow jobs synchronized Redshift. The sprawl produced 18-hour delays, duplicated transformations, and opaque lineage that frustrated every business stakeholder.
We partnered with data engineering, infrastructure, and finance teams to design an AWS-native lake architecture with raw and curated S3 zones, automated governance, and observability. The roadmap covered discovery, migration, change management, and steady-state operations to ensure every audience trusted the new source of truth.
Challenges
- A brittle collector tier required custom scripts for each new source and lacked schema drift detection.
- Licensing and hardware refreshes for on-prem servers consumed more than four hundred thousand dollars annually.
- Analytics teams depended on stale Redshift replicas that duplicated raw data and enforced conflicting business rules.
Approach
Orchestrated migration blueprint
Cataloged 122 tables and 19 API feeds, sequenced cutovers by operational risk, and established DataSync jobs with checksum validation so each wave of history landed cleanly in S3.
Guarded raw and curated S3 zones
Provisioned versioned buckets, lifecycle management, and Lake Formation tags that separate immutable raw data from curated, analytics-ready partitions exposed through Athena and Redshift Spectrum.
Automated curation and observability
Bundled Glue crawlers, Glue ETL jobs, and Step Functions state machines so schema changes alert stakeholders, curated refreshes complete within 30 minutes, and CloudWatch dashboards surface pipeline health.
Impact delivered
- Ingestion latency dropped from 18 hours to less than 45 minutes, unlocking same-day analytics for finance, merchandising, and marketing.
- Retired 14 on-prem servers and a bespoke collector platform, avoiding roughly $320K per year in hardware and licensing.
- Eliminated redundant raw data copies in Redshift, saving approximately $68K annually while simplifying governance.
- Analysts collaborated on a single curated catalog backed by consistent lifecycle policies and automated data quality signals.
Key lessons
- Sequencing migrations by business impact keeps legacy collectors online just long enough to validate parity.
- S3 zone design, catalog automation, and Lake Formation policies prevent recreating silos inside modern lakes.
- Operational visibility across DataSync, Glue, and Step Functions is essential for lasting trust in the new platform.
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