From Telia to AWS: How Barbora Modernized Infrastructure and Reduced Cloud Costs with Cloudvisor
The Client
Barbora is the leading online grocery delivery platform in Lithuania and one of the largest e-commerce retail businesses in the Baltic region. Operating across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, Barbora enables individual consumers, families, and businesses to order everyday essentials, groceries, and household goods online for direct home delivery or click-and-collect fulfillment.
Part of the Maxima Group ecosystem, Barbora manages a digital infrastructure that handles inventory, order processing, route optimization, and customer service across three countries.
- Industry: E-commerce & Retail Technology
- Company Size:1,000+ employees
- Country:Lithuania
Challenges
Barbora was previously running its infrastructure on an aging on-premise setup hosted at Telia, which presented several limitations:
- Scalability constraints – Resource rigidity and physical hardware limits made it difficult to handle rapid, unpredictable traffic spikes inherent in e-commerce retail.
- High operational costs – High maintenance and hosting expenses for physical servers with limited opportunities for cost control or right-sizing.
- Limited flexibility – Heavy reliance on a vendor-mediated change request process for hardware adjustments, creating operational bottlenecks and hindering technical agility.
- Need for a robust setup – Required an elastic, cloud-native architecture with automated high availability to replace risky manual failover mechanisms and eliminate cross-environment network latency.
Solutions
To solve these challenges, Barbora required a phased migration of 15 VMware virtual machines (10 Windows application servers and 5 database servers) to AWS, with Cloudvisor providing the migration strategy and hands-on guidance.
Phase 1: Initial Migration & Runbook Validation
- Executed a low-risk initial migration wave (Estonia) to validate runbook execution and secure change-window timings.
- A database engine compatibility issue triggered a Wave 1 rollback; the team decoupled the engine upgrade from the migration and re-ran the wave successfully.
Phase 2: Process Refinement & Secondary Rollout
- Migrated the secondary market workloads (Latvia) within the strict 3-hour maintenance window, despite higher-than-expected transaction log volume.
- Refined backup timing and credential checks based on Wave 2 findings ahead of the final, most complex wave.
Phase 3: Core Infrastructure Consolidation
- Migrated the central database holding multi-country data alongside the remaining application servers for the primary market (Lithuania).
- Decommissioned legacy mirror and witness virtual machines, replacing them with managed AWS Multi-AZ automatic failover.
Phase 4: Traffic Cutover & Knowledge Transfer
- Used weighted ALB routing to shift live production traffic to AWS per market, with no partner-side DNS changes required.
- Delivered complete Terraform infrastructure-as-code files and conducted hands-on handover workshops for the internal team.
AWS Services Used
- Amazon RDS for SQL Server
- Amazon EC2
- Application Load Balancer (ALB)
- AWS Transit Gateway
- AWS Secrets Manager
- AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
- Amazon CloudWatch
- Amazon SNS
Results
The migration empowered Barbora with a modern AWS setup that cut costs, improved reliability, and set the foundation for future growth — all achieved without disrupting ongoing operations.
Projected $12K–24K annual savings
Right-sizing AWS resources is expected to beat Telia's cost; final figures confirm post-Lithuania go-live.
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Noticeably lower query latency
Cross-environment boundary eliminated; eShop team confirms a clear improvement, full metrics pending.
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Failover in under 2 minutes
Improved reliability through managed RDS Multi-AZ and CloudWatch monitoring.
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Increased agility
Infrastructure fully codified with Terraform, giving the team direct, self-service control.
