Breaking free from lock-in: How a leading insurance provider migrated 1,500 workloads to ROSA in 10 months

Imagine finding out your core platform contract is ending, leaving you with a multi million-dollar liability—and just 10 months to move 1,500 critical workloads. That was the reality for the engineering team at State Farm.

While they had previously used Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and VMware vSphere, the underlying platform was highly proprietary. To escape vendor lock-in and secure long-term cloud portability, State Farm executed an urgent, 10-month race to migrate 1,500 workloads to Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), all without disrupting core business operations. 

Figure 1. Burt Lappe, Engineering Manager, and Vamsi Nainavarapu, Senior Technology Engineer at State Farm, Sean Malloy, OpenShift Technical Account Manager, Red Hat, presenting at Red Hat Summit 2026

The cost of tool sprawl and operational friction

To pull off this shift, the engineering team first had to clear significant roadblocks. For a major insurance provider, a traditional full stack cloud strategy introduced operational hurdles. Only the top 10% to 20% of software engineers possessed the infrastructure knowledge required to manage security groups, identity and access management, and underlying cloud plumbing. The remaining majority of developers faced extreme cognitive load, distracting them from building core business capabilities.

Compounding this developer friction was an application portfolio weighted down by isolated team structures, outdated frameworks, and critical internal systems relying on traditional HTTP clients.

The largest operational hurdle was meeting the strict compliance, networking, and governance standards of a heavily regulated insurance and financial services provider. This process typically requires extensive cross-team coordination. Facing a hard contract termination date, the team realized that relying on traditional datacenter infrastructure provisioning would completely stall the migration before it even started, requiring a rapid shift to modern, cloud-native architecture.

Treating the platform as a product with automated scaling

To bypass these delays, the engineering organization shifted its strategy. They stopped treating cloud infrastructure as a collection of raw services and began treating the platform as a distinct product designed for developer use.

The core of this new architecture relied on ROSA. ROSA is a fully managed cloud platform that allows developers to deploy applications on AWS without having to manually configure the underlying servers or Kubernetes clusters. Instead of manually configuring infrastructure for each team, they standardized repeatable cluster blueprints that automatically applied corporate compliance parameters, standard network topologies, and baseline security configurations during the automated build cycle.

With the deadline looming, the company pivoted from its centralized model by deploying dedicated clusters directly to specific business units. They granted cluster administrator rights to local business area enablement teams. This distributed ownership model allowed individual lines of business to manage their own application migration schedules and install necessary Red Hat OpenShift operators without creating centralized engineering bottlenecks.

Consolidating clusters and reducing total cost of ownership

The standardized container strategy delivered immediate operational resilience. During a scheduled disaster recovery drill, the team used its unified GitOps traffic routing architecture to successfully fail over 32 critical clusters in less than 4 hours.

"If you are in containers, I highly suggest that you look to containerize a lot of your workloads, and then look at the easier migration path to native solutions too," said Burt Lappe, Engineering Manager at State Farm. "You can containerize all that older tech debt, move it to the cloud, and focus on application capabilities rather than managing infrastructure."

As the high-stakes migration was actively underway, the platform engineering team identified a parallel path to further reduce infrastructure costs and accelerate deployment speeds. By migrating from classic cluster architecture to ROSA with hosted control planes, the team unburdened individual accounts from hosting dedicated infrastructure management nodes. This architectural evolution cut cluster provisioning times by 68%, dropping the build cycle baseline down from 75 minutes. 

Nainavarapu noted that this architectural transition was completed with zero disruption to active business service. "We rebuilt the clusters using ROSA with hosted control planes and migrated all 32 clusters within 4 weeks without any impact," he said. "This move delivered a 30% cost savings compared to classic architecture and reduced our cluster build times down to 24 minutes."

Looking forward, State Farm is shifting its focus from an urgent, reactive migration to proactive, long-term planning.. With the high-stakes migration behind them, the team is transitioning away from its temporary business area clusters. The next 6 months of the technical roadmap focus on deploying Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes to manage a centralized, shared cluster fleet, providing absolute operational consistency and uniform security governance across the entire corporate environment. What started as an urgent race to escape vendor lock-in has evolved into a masterclass in cloud native scalability—giving them the freedom to deploy, secure, and scale infrastructure on their own terms.

Facing your own high-stakes migration?? 

Discover how Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) can help you clear the infrastructure bottlenecks and accelerate your deployments. 

Additional resources:

• Modernize your IT with Cloud Services e-book 
• 4 Reasons to Run Applications on ROSA checklist