Case Study
Designing an AWS foundation for a large-scale migration
Atlas Air
Role
AWS Solutions Architect
Period
September 2025 – June 2026
Reporting Line
VP of IT and Director of IT
Industry
Air Cargo / Aviation
The Problem
Atlas Air was planning a migration of its on-premises infrastructure and applications to AWS, spanning more than 1,000 servers and mission-critical systems.
The program needed a target cloud environment with account, network, identity, security, and operational patterns, plus a migration sequence that aligned internal engineering, infrastructure, security, and vendor teams.
Why It Mattered
The need was a complete AWS target architecture and migration path, with security and governance designed into the foundation and clear architecture artifacts to coordinate a complex program.
What Ken Did
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Designed the multi-account target environment. Defined AWS account strategy, VPC topology, networking architecture, and core platform services for the migration and future cloud workloads.
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Established Cloud Center of Excellence foundations. Defined initial standards for IAM, networking, environment strategy, and workload onboarding across the migration and future development.
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Built FinOps automation and governance guardrails. Developed Python automation for FinOps controls and used Terraform to deploy AWS Config and supporting infrastructure changes, helping constrain what development and other teams could do in AWS and control cloud spend.
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Planned security migration and hardening. Aligned identity, network controls, and logging/monitoring patterns with requirements while modernizing around AWS-native services.
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Designed high availability and disaster recovery. Planned a highly available, multi-region future state for Globalscape EFT supporting airline integrations.
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Sequenced migration with the delivery organizations. Worked with engineering, infrastructure, security, and vendors to clarify responsibilities, dependencies, and migration order; produced architecture diagrams, documents, and patterns to guide execution.
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Designed workload and storage migration paths. Planned workload migration and modernization approaches, including storage changes with projected savings documented separately from realized results.
What Changed
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A target AWS architecture and migration path were established for an infrastructure program spanning more than 1,000 servers.
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Initial account, IAM, network, and workload-onboarding standards gave teams a consistent foundation for migration planning.
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Python FinOps automation and Terraform-deployed AWS Config and supporting infrastructure established additional cost-control and governance guardrails.
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Security migration work and multi-region disaster-recovery architecture were incorporated into the target design.
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Projected storage savings remained identified as a forecast, not realized savings.
What Continued Afterward
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AWS multi-account target architecture and migration patterns
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Python FinOps automation and Terraform-managed AWS Config governance guardrails
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Network, identity, security, and workload-onboarding design
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Multi-region disaster-recovery architecture for airline integrations
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Architecture artifacts and migration sequencing across internal and vendor teams
Tools Behind the Work
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