Shutterfly’s accelerated cloud transformation in migrating VMware workloads to AWS

Leveraging Shutterfly’s unique personalization at scale capability, Shutterfly Business Solutions (SBS) provides on-demand B2B personalized printing services. For years, SBS’ server environment was an on-premises VMware vSphere environment. SBS has a complex work environment with about 300 services across over 40 application suites that resided in stand-alone stacks. At peak SBS ran over 2,000 virtual machines (VMs) with a 60%/40% Microsoft Windows and Linux split. The company experienced recurring capacity and scalability issues demanding a modernization initiative to move to the cloud to reduce operational costs, boost agility, and unlock innovation. A few years prior, other Shutterfly business units chose AWS as its strategic partner for its reliability, scale, and breadth of services to be more agile in meeting the needs of millions of consumers. It had already migrated all its core production applications and its more than 75-petabyte consumer image library to AWS, and in 2021, Shutterfly made the decision to evacuate its colocated data center to continue its transformation journey to enhance innovation.

Because of recurring issues, SBS looked for a stepping stone in its cloud journey and opted to use VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS) as a bridge to a native cloud presence on AWS.

SBS completed its migration from VMware on-premises to VMC on AWS in August of 2022, and then immediately shifted its focus to migrating legacy application stacks on Microsoft Windows and Linux VMs to AWS technologies.  “Our goals for our cloud native migration were modernization, scalability, cost transparency, reliability, and security,” said Tom Young, Infrastructure Architect at Shutterfly. SBS prepared for its migration by taking a close look at its environment to determine how many VMs it actually needed. “We wanted to right-size our environment, so we consolidated systems and data, reducing our VM footprint from over 2000 VMs to 1200,” said Young.

SBS planned to migrate some application services to AWS services by the end of 2025, and it committed to full migration from VMC on AWS to AWS services before SBS peak season 2025, which began in July. “Then there was a change catalyst when the vendor was unable to execute to our needs,” said Young. At that point SBS decided to pull-in its migration schedule by a remarkable 6 months, completing it in March 2025. “We’re extremely proud of the team's preparation and precision throughout this critical infrastructure transformation.”

The company implemented a wave planning approach  –  the process of grouping applications and infrastructure into manageable phases or ‘waves’ for migration, based on factors like dependencies, business criticality, and technical complexity. This rules-based approach helps break down large migrations into smaller, more manageable steps, reducing risk, and improving efficiency.

“As we migrated our VMC on AWS workloads to Amazon ECS and Amazon EC2, we enhanced our CI/CD pipeline which sped up feature releases. By using services like Amazon ECS and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP to enable high availability, we experienced no high-severity incidents as a result of the migration” said Dalton Price, Principal Systems Engineer at Shutterfly, Inc. “We had a corporate initiative to move to microservices for efficiency and a consistent environment for application development, so we migrated  80% of our workloads to Amazon ECS, with the other 20% to Amazon EC2 for commercial applications.”  

Some of SBS’s workloads were running on operating systems that were nearing the end of life, which made a lift-and-shift migration the most practical approach. “During our migration process we reviewed and migrated around 800 systems from VMC on AWS to AWS services and roughly 400TB of data – including archival data into Amazon S3,” said Price. By migrating to AWS, Shutterfly also experienced a more stable environment. “We had no high severity incidents after our migration, and experienced better redundancy, without a single point of failure,” said Young.

SBS migrated 100% of its VMC servers to AWS, while speeding up future feature releases through its CI/CD pipeline.

“Through our VMware migration to AWS we realized about 25% operating cost reduction through license avoidance and right-sizing, and we realized  a significant reduction in technical debt.”

Ian Wright

Vice President of Infrastructure at Shutterfly

In moving to AWS services, SBS is able to deliver a great experience to millions of customers through reliability, scale, agility, and breadth of services. “Being on AWS gives us the opportunity to use other managed services to accelerate innovation, such as investing in AI-driven automation for our manufacturing facilities,” said Young.