KamelPay migrates its core payments platform to AWS with zero payment downtime

KamelPay’s transaction platform ran on an on-premises, VM-based estate built on Microsoft SQL Server. Mobile and web front ends had already moved to AWS, but the core database and core application remained on-premises — and that split was now the constraint: the on-premises database was hitting resource and load limits throttling remittance and payroll growth, and the single-data-center posture carried business-continuity and resilience risk. KamelPay needed to move the core platform to AWS quickly without interrupting live payment processing or breaking the private, regulated connectivity to its banking and processor partners. Two hard requirements: no downtime to payments or bank connectivity; and preserve the regulated bank rails (dedicated IPsec/MPLS links). KamelPay came in set on keeping the same SQL Server engine on AWS under its own license, self-managed on Amazon EC2 — no managed database services.

A phased migration in three one-week phases — Discovery & Planning, Migration Execution, Testing & Validation — with joint daily standups and milestone retrospectives. Discovery audited the on-premises infrastructure, applications, and data schemas and produced a migration strategy with contingencies. On the data tier, VeUP made the case for a different path than KamelPay’s starting ask: rather than lifting SQL Server onto self-managed EC2, VeUP recommended — and delivered — the core payments database on Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Multi-AZ, a fully managed engine with automated cross-AZ failover, backups, and patching. The database moved homogeneously — same engine, same schema, no conversion step — via a one-time native backup restored into RDS from Amazon S3; application connectivity was repointed to the managed in-VPC RDS endpoint with all traffic internal to the AWS VPC. VeUP re-implemented the architecture on AWS as Infrastructure as Code. A phased validated cutover progressed from non-critical to mission-critical workloads so existing uptime/latency/performance SLAs were met or exceeded with no corruption or loss. The target topology carried KamelPay’s existing private bank and processor connections (IPsec site-to-site VPN + private MPLS) into the AWS VPC, and the platform was deployed across two Availability Zones in the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region with the core database in Multi-AZ configuration.