Enterprise Cloud Migration: 4,500 Instances to OpenStack
René Bon Ćirić
Enterprise Cloud Migration: 4,500 Instances to OpenStack on OpenShift
Role: Principal Cloud Infrastructure Architect & Migration Lead
Client/Context: ADIP (Digital Agency for Public Innovation, Government of Mexico City)
Timeline: 6 weeks execution
Core Technologies: Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift (RHOSO 18), Red Hat Ceph Storage (Ceph 9), RHOSP 16.2, Bash, Python, GNU Make,
os-migrate Challenge & Problem Statement
The agency operated a mission-critical private cloud with over 4,500 active virtual instances hosting civic infrastructure, public services, and government portals on an aging Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP 16.2) deployment.
The client needed to migrate to Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift (RHOSO 18) and Red Hat Ceph Storage (Ceph 9) to achieve modern container-native infrastructure management, enhanced security posture, and compliance with national digital sovereignty standards.
The primary obstacle: standard manual migration pathways would have required thousands of labor hours, extended service outages, and significant risk of state corruption across critical public workloads.
Architectural Solution & Strategy
Systems Architecture
Control Plane & Metadata Migration
Utilized and extended
os-migrate to serialize and recreate users, projects, security groups, networks, router configurations, and quotas between RHOSP 16.2 and RHOSO 18 control planes within minutes.Semi-Automated Instance Pipeline
Designed a custom migration orchestrator using modular Bash and Python pipelines coordinated by GNU Make. The system handled pre-flight network checks, live volume snapshotting, data replication across Ceph pools, and post-migration validation.
Resilient Batch Processing
Structured migration waves by agency criticality, ensuring zero disruption to emergency services and municipal data endpoints.
Implementation Highlights
Engineered automated idempotency checks to allow instantaneous resume capabilities in case of network drops between clusters.
Configured automated DNS, DHCP, and firewall rule handoffs, avoiding IP address collisions during parallel cluster operation.
Authored runbooks and delivered hands-on training to government engineers on RHOSO 18, RHCS 9, and Red Hat Satellite administration.
Verifiable Results & Business Impact
Labor Hour Reduction: 80% decrease in required engineering hours compared to initial vendor estimates.
Delivery Timeline: Migrated ~4,500 legacy instances and complete control plane state in under 6 weeks.
Data Integrity: 100% data preservation with zero data loss across critical public records.
Sovereign Independence: Eliminated legacy single points of failure, establishing a fully supported, container-native cloud foundation.
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Posted Sep 19, 2026
Migrated 4,500+ private cloud instances to OpenStack on OpenShift in 6 weeks with 80% labor hour reduction and zero data loss.
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Timeline
Dec 1, 2025 - Apr 30, 2026
Clients
ADIP
