The Challenge
SeekBusiness is Australia's most visited online business-for-sale marketplace, connecting prospective entrepreneurs with nearly 20,000 opportunities advertised by business owners, brokers, franchisors, and distributors.
The platform was running on a monolithic architecture with manual deployment processes that took hours to complete. A legacy ASP.NET Identity authentication system was blocking RESTful API adoption, and the on-premises infrastructure could not scale to meet demand. Database administration overhead was increasing, and the business needed a path to modern, cloud-native architecture without disrupting a live production platform.
The Solution
Kodez designed and executed a phased migration to AWS, modernising the architecture incrementally to minimise risk while accelerating delivery capability.
Cloud infrastructure
A dedicated Virtual Private Cloud in AWS provided the foundation. Multi-AZ EC2 instances with a load balancer delivered high availability, while AWS RDS with multi-AZ replication replaced the on-premises database. AWS CloudWatch integrated with Splunk provided monitoring and alerting across the estate.
Architecture modernisation
Domain-Driven Design patterns were applied to modularise the monolith, extracting business contexts into Lambda-based microservices. AWS API Gateway became the orchestration point for all APIs. The phased approach allowed gradual decomposition — no big-bang migration.
Authentication overhaul
The legacy ASP.NET Identity system was replaced with OAuth2 and Auth0, enabling secure third-party integrations and unblocking the RESTful API strategy.
CI/CD pipeline
A mix of AWS CodePipeline and Buildkite automated the deployment pipeline. CodePipeline handled Lambda and microservice deployments; Buildkite managed EC2 legacy application deployments. All infrastructure was defined as code.
The Outcomes
The main application deployment time was reduced from hours of manual effort to a few minutes — enabling deployments during business hours without risk. The serverless Lambda model delivered significant cost reductions and theoretically unlimited scalability for independent microservices.
SeekBusiness gained a modern, observable platform capable of supporting rapid feature delivery and strategic third-party integrations.
