Cloud & Kubernetes Platform Migration
2nd March 2026 ·
A global payment provider, formed through multiple acquisitions and backed by a major private equity firm, was consolidating and modernising its technology landscape to support scale, resilience and real-time transaction processing. The organisation was moving away from legacy VM-based systems deployed across multiple data centres towards a modern Kubernetes environment (AWS EKS), enabling improved scalability, consistency and observability across its payments platform. Albany Beck was engaged to provide additional engineering and delivery capability to support this migration while maintaining stability across live, business-critical payment services.
Challenge
The client was delivering a complex, high-risk migration across multiple teams and services, but internal engineering capacity was stretched, and Kubernetes experience was limited. A previous delivery partner was underperforming, creating delays and increasing delivery risk. The migration required close coordination across engineering teams, payments services and shared technology platforms, but ownership of migration activities and alignment across stakeholders was inconsistent. Without additional capacity, the client faced continued delays, increased operational risk and reduced confidence in the programme.
Approach
Albany Beck augmented the client’s platform and payments engineering teams with additional delivery capacity, embedding engineers and delivery practitioners directly into existing squads. We aligned closely with engineering and platform leadership to agree priority services, migration sequencing and release constraints, and ensured resources integrated into established development pipelines, environments and ways of working. Clear delivery coordination and communication rhythms were set up to support cross-team alignment and maintain momentum across a complex, multi-service migration.
Solution
Albany Beck engineers worked hands-on across the migration, supporting both VM-to-VM and VM-to-Kubernetes transitions within a live payments environment. Teams contributed directly to containerisation, deployment and release activity, while supporting the adoption of modern architectural patterns, including event-driven design. Improved observability was established through the implementation of tooling such as Datadog and Snowflake, and engineers worked closely with platform and messaging teams to align Kubernetes adoption with the internal developer platform and long-term messaging standards.
Outcomes
The client successfully migrated critical payment services to Kubernetes while maintaining stability across live transaction processing. Delivery velocity increased as embedded engineering capacity reduced bottlenecks and improved coordination across teams. Platform resilience and observability improved through enhanced monitoring and release controls, reducing operational risk during periods of change. The migration provided a scalable, cloud-native foundation that better supports future payments growth, ongoing platform evolution and continued modernisation.