Off ageing hardware, onto a bill the board approved in advance

Nordhaven Freight runs shipment tracking and customs documentation for mid-sized freight forwarders across northern Europe. The platform ran on eleven physical servers in a Rotterdam colocation facility, bought in three batches between 2012 and 2019. Two of those batches were past vendor support, and the replacement quote for the oldest rack alone was EUR 140,000.

The engineering team of six had no infrastructure specialist. Environment changes were made by hand and recorded in a shared document that had last been updated eight months earlier. A previous migration attempt with a different supplier had stalled after four months, leaving a half-configured cloud account that was still being billed, and understandable scepticism inside the company about trying again.

The final cutover ran on a Sunday morning in 38 minutes against an announced four hour window. No rollback was needed and no customer-reported incident followed in the two weeks afterwards. The old estate ran in parallel for thirty days, then was decommissioned on a written schedule with backups verified before anything was powered down.

The cost result held. Across the first two full billing cycles after decommissioning, infrastructure spend averaged EUR 18,500 per month against a previous run rate of EUR 31,400 including hardware amortisation, hosting and vendor support. The EUR 140,000 rack replacement was avoided entirely. Nordhaven's own engineers now make environment changes through pull requests, and the shared document that used to be the system of record has been deleted.