Over the past year our solutions team has helped 140 growing companies move production workloads from region-bound cloud setups to Cirrolane. We tracked the same metrics before and after each move. The results were consistent enough to share.
Why teams start looking
The trigger is rarely cost alone. Most teams come to us when they open a second or third region and realise that their infrastructure code, database replication and deployment pipelines all need to be duplicated by hand. Operational load grows faster than the engineering team.
What we measured
For every migration we recorded deployment frequency, median pipeline duration, time to restore after an incident and total monthly infrastructure spend, averaged over the eight weeks before and after cut-over.
- Deploys per week rose from a median of 9 to 28.
- Median pipeline time fell from 14 minutes to just over 5.
- Time to restore after incidents dropped from 47 minutes to 12.
- Monthly spend fell by 38 per cent at the median, mostly from idle capacity.
We did not move to save money. We moved so that opening a new market stopped being an infrastructure project. The savings were a pleasant side effect.
How a typical migration runs
Most teams migrate one service at a time behind a weighted router. Traffic starts at 1 per cent on Cirrolane, rises as error budgets allow, and the old environment stays warm until the last service moves. The median migration took five weeks from first deploy to full cut-over.
export const routes = {
"/api/*": { cirrolane: 25, legacy: 75 },
"/checkout/*": { cirrolane: 100 },
"/*": { cirrolane: 100 },
};What to watch out for
Data gravity is the main challenge. Services that make many small queries to a single large database should move together with that database, or use our regional read replicas first. Teams that ignored this saw latency rise before it fell.
- Operational load, not cost, is usually what starts a migration.
- Move one service at a time behind a weighted router.
- Keep chatty services close to their data during the move.
- Expect faster pipelines and more frequent, smaller deploys.