Aerospace Manufacturer Cuts Azure Costs by 60% by Modernising Legacy Applications into Containers

Overview

Modern hosting for business-critical applications

The client is a manufacturer in the aerospace sector. Its operations depend on a portfolio of line-of-business applications, many of them built years ago and still running on infrastructure designed for a different era.

Those applications had been moved to Azure, but largely as they were. Each ran on its own dedicated infrastructure, sized for peak demand and running continuously whether it was busy or not. Releases were manual, environments drifted apart, and the cost of hosting kept rising.

Konsolute modernised the applications by containerising them and moving them onto shared, right-sized container hosting in Azure. We introduced DevOps practices so that applications are built, tested and released through automated pipelines. Together, these changes reduced the client's Azure costs by 60%.

The challenge

Paying for capacity the applications didn't use

Legacy applications hosted on dedicated virtual machines are expensive to run in the cloud. Each one carries the cost of its own operating system, patching and spare capacity, and resources are paid for around the clock regardless of demand.

The applications were also hard to change. Deployments relied on manual steps and individual knowledge, making releases slow and risky. Differences between environments meant that something working in test was not guaranteed to work in production.

For an aerospace manufacturer, the applications still had to be reliable and secure throughout. Modernisation could not put day-to-day operations at risk.

The client needed to:

Our approach

Containerise, consolidate and automate

We assessed each application individually, then moved suitable workloads onto shared container hosting with automated build and release pipelines.

Application assessment. Konsolute reviewed each legacy application, its dependencies, configuration and resource use. This identified which applications could be containerised directly, which needed changes first, and how each would behave on the new platform.

Containerisation. Applications were packaged as containers with their runtime and dependencies defined in code. This made them portable and consistent, and removed the need for each one to have its own dedicated server.

Right-sized container hosting. Containerised applications moved onto shared container hosting in Azure. Workloads share underlying capacity and are sized to actual demand, rather than each reserving resources for its own peak.

DevOps implementation. We introduced source control and automated pipelines to build, test and deploy each application. Environments are defined consistently, so the same container moves from development through test into production.

Phased migration. Applications moved in planned phases, with each validated before the legacy infrastructure behind it was decommissioned. This kept operations running throughout the transition.

Result

60% lower Azure costs and faster, safer releases

Modernising the applications into containers reduced the client's Azure costs by 60%. Consolidating workloads onto shared, right-sized hosting removed the cost of dedicated infrastructure that was running whether it was needed or not.

DevOps pipelines have made releases repeatable and consistent. Applications are built and deployed the same way every time, reducing reliance on manual steps and the risk of configuration drift between environments.

The client now has a modern, maintainable application estate that is easier to secure, cheaper to run and quicker to change.