Case Study
Reducing AWS Cost and Deployment Complexity by Moving from 7 Applications to a Multi-Tenant Rails Architecture
Infrastructure complexity and duplicated deployments increased operational overhead.
Client Type
IT Staffing & Recruitment Company
Result
35-45% estimated AWS cost reduction with simplified engineering operations.
Detailed Breakdown
Worked on an IT staffing and recruitment platform built using Ruby on Rails, React, Docker, and AWS infrastructure. The platform was designed for HR operations, recruitment workflows, staffing management, and client-developer associations.
The client initially decided to maintain separate applications for different departments instead of using a multi-tenant architecture. Over time, this created significant development duplication, deployment complexity, and unnecessary AWS operational costs.
Problem
The system architecture was divided into:
The client initially decided to maintain separate applications for different departments instead of using a multi-tenant architecture. Over time, this created significant development duplication, deployment complexity, and unnecessary AWS operational costs.
Problem
The system architecture was divided into:
- 3 frontend applications
- 3 backend applications
- 1 admin application
Total: 7 separate applications.
Each application had:
Each application had:
- Separate repositories
- Separate AWS Beanstalk environments
- Separate deployment pipelines
- Separate Docker deployments
As the platform evolved, several operational challenges appeared:
- Shared features required repetitive implementation across all applications
- Nearly 60-70% of engineering effort for common modules became duplicated work
- Every common update triggered 7 separate deployment pipelines
- QA cycles became slower because features needed validation across multiple systems
- AWS infrastructure and monitoring overhead kept increasing despite relatively low traffic
- Development velocity started slowing due to architectural duplication
The architecture was creating more operational complexity than actual business scale required.
Solution
We analyzed the existing architecture and recommended moving toward a centralized multi-tenant Rails architecture instead of maintaining isolated applications for each department.
The proposed solution included:
Solution
We analyzed the existing architecture and recommended moving toward a centralized multi-tenant Rails architecture instead of maintaining isolated applications for each department.
The proposed solution included:
- A single shared Rails application
- Tenant-based data isolation
- Shared reusable business modules
- Centralized deployment pipelines
- Unified Docker infrastructure
- Simplified AWS environment management
The goal was to reduce operational overhead while improving long-term scalability and engineering efficiency.
Result
The proposed architecture would help:
Result
The proposed architecture would help:
- Reduce AWS infrastructure cost by an estimated 35-45%
- Reduce deployment operations from 7 separate releases to a centralized deployment workflow
- Eliminate a significant amount of duplicate engineering effort
- Improve feature rollout speed
- Simplify CI/CD management
- Reduce long-term maintenance complexity
- Improve engineering productivity and scalability planning
The biggest learning from this project was:
Early-stage SaaS systems often become expensive not because of traffic, but because of architectural decisions that introduce unnecessary operational duplication.
Early-stage SaaS systems often become expensive not because of traffic, but because of architectural decisions that introduce unnecessary operational duplication.