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Aurora Public Schools Migrates Off VMware to AWS, Beating Hard Deadline with Zero Downtime
Migrations
Generative AI
At a glance
Aurora Public Schools, one of Colorado's largest K-12 districts, serves more than 38,000 students and roughly 6,800 staff. Facing an expiring contract on its VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts environment and rising Broadcom licensing costs, the district partnered with Caylent to migrate its entire server estate to native AWS infrastructure using Caylent Accelerate™, an agentic delivery system. Working alongside a Caylent team over 14 weeks, Aurora's infrastructure staff moved 127 servers off VMware, stood up a full AWS landing zone, and exited its on-premises data center footprint entirely, all before the deadline and without disruption to students or staff.
Solution Implemented
→ Assessed a 200-VM estate and scoped 127 servers for migration, sequencing the work across four migration waves.
→ Over 14 weeks, 107 servers were rehosted using AWS Application Migration Service, with 20 replatformed as new instances.
→ Stood up AWS Control Tower, networking, and security guardrails in parallel with the migration rather than sequencing the work afterward.
→ Full environment was codified in Terraform, giving Aurora's team modules to push out resources in bulk alongside day-to-day management through the AWS Management Console.
→ Caylent built and handed off a CI/CD pipeline tailored to Aurora's environment for the district to continue using independently.
→ Three dedicated sessions on AWS Security Hub, AWS Backup, and AWS Systems Manager equipped Aurora's team to operate and troubleshoot the environment.
Outcomes
→ Migration time savings from 21 to 14 weeks by leveraging the Caylent Accelerate™ agentic delivery system.
→ Completed the migration ahead of the Outposts contract expiration, helping the district avoid potential disruption to its operations.
→ Nightly transfers of a roughly 40-gigabyte database file sped up by nearly an hour after being rerouted through an AWS load balancer instead of the district's legacy firewall path.
→ The district cut 73 servers during the move, reducing what its small infrastructure team has to patch, secure, and maintain.
→ Configured AWS Security Hub against CIS, NIST CSF, and HIPAA benchmarks and replaced Aurora's uniform, wide-open server access with segmented security groups and web application firewall protection on public-facing applications.
A District Under Deadline
Aurora Public Schools is one of Colorado's largest K-12 school districts, serving more than 38,000 students and roughly 6,800 staff. Like most public school systems, Aurora runs its technology operations on a lean team relative to the scale of what it supports, managing everything from classroom applications to district-wide security with a small infrastructure staff and a budget that shifts year to year with public funding.
As technology becomes more central to how K-12 districts operate, from instructional tools to the systems that keep schools running day to day, the infrastructure choices a district makes now carry consequences years into the future. For Aurora, a legacy on-premises commitment was about to force exactly that kind of decision.
Business Challenge
For years, Aurora Public Schools ran roughly 200 servers on VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, an arrangement that kept VMware-based virtualization tools running on dedicated hardware inside the district's own data center. The setup required Aurora to maintain the physical infrastructure that comes with any on-premises environment, including uninterruptible power supplies, generators, and the hardware refresh cycles that a small IT staff must plan around.
“The factor to move away was Broadcom, and knowing the price increases we were seeing, it just didn't seem feasible as an option to explore,” said Jim Looper, director of infrastructure services at Aurora Public Schools. “Plus we had this Broadcom environment in an AWS Outpost in our data center. We thought, why not go all the way?”
The urgency was concrete. Aurora's Outposts contract was set to expire in several months, and the hardware would be reclaimed if the district had not fully migrated by then. Justin Allen, technical solutions architect at Aurora Public Schools, said the district had built up deep VMware expertise over the years, but had almost no operating experience in native AWS. “This move didn't come without risk. It looked good on paper, but we needed to fill some skill gaps as well.”
With a small team, Looper said the calculus came down to manpower versus horsepower. Aurora couldn't count on adding infrastructure staff given the unpredictability of public education funding, so the district needed an environment it could scale without having to keep a physical data center alive indefinitely.
“What we got from the initial interaction with Caylent was truly a partnership and an understanding. The communication piece, and that willingness to hop on and troubleshoot right away totally changes it. Other vendors could be two, three days out. I felt like Caylent did care, not just to finish the project, but that our day-to-day business was successful.”
Jim Looper
Director of Infrastructure Services
Solution
Aurora evaluated three partners for the migration, brought to the district through its AWS account team, ranging from a small two-person shop to a large, standardized systems integrator.
“What we got from the initial interaction with Caylent was truly a partnership and an understanding,” Looper said. “We'd be big enough to have dedicated resources, but not so big that we would be lost and just another number to the company.”
Discovery identified 127 servers to migrate out of a 200-VM total estate. Caylent and Aurora rehosted 107 of those servers using AWS Application Migration Service and replatformed the remaining 20 as new instances, sequencing the work across four migration waves over 14 weeks. Rather than migrate first and build a foundation later, Caylent stood up Aurora's AWS landing zone, including AWS Control Tower, networking, and security guardrails, coinciding with migration waves. Caylent used its Caylent Accelerate™ delivery methodology to drive the engagement, applying AI to validate server inventory, map dependencies, and automate AWS Application Migration Service configuration. By leveraging their agentic delivery approach, Caylent cut the migration timeline from 21 to just 14 weeks, a massive savings in the face of Aurora’s expiring contract.
Caylent engineers worked as embedded members of Aurora's team for the duration of the engagement. The team codified the entire environment in Terraform, giving Aurora modules to deploy resources in bulk, while also setting the district up to manage day-to-day operations through the AWS Management Console. Caylent also built and handed off a custom CI/CD pipeline, something Allen said went beyond what the district had scoped.
According to Allen, “They gave us a tool that was custom-made for us that we can continue using down the road for as long as we want. That alone was worth a lot of money.”
Knowledge transfer ran alongside the technical build. Caylent led three workshops covering AWS Security Hub, AWS Backup, and Systems Manager, walking Aurora's team through not just how the environment was configured but why, so staff could replicate and troubleshoot the work independently once the engagement ended.
Working with Caylent
For a district with a small team taking on its first native AWS environment, the stakes of the engagement went beyond the technology. Looper described the migration as the kind of project that could define a career if it went wrong.
“We didn't want them to just migrate for us,” Looper said. “We wanted to be in a partnership so we could learn as well.” Allen described the Caylent team's approach to that hesitation in more visual terms. “The imagery I keep thinking about is a bunch of penguins on an iceberg in the ocean, and the guy at the edge doesn't want to go, and it gets pushed in anyway. They took a lot of the hesitation that we had and made sure that we were okay with things.”
That hesitation gave way to confidence early. Allen said the caliber of the Caylent team, several of whom came from AWS, gave him a sounding board he didn't have internally. “For me it was like I kind of know what to do, but I would like to have somebody behind me saying yes, you're right, or no, here's another way, and that's exactly what it was. We bounced ideas off each other.”
Looper pointed to responsiveness as the clearest difference from other vendors he has worked with. “The communication piece, and that willingness to hop on and troubleshoot right away totally changes it,” Looper said. “Other vendors could be two, three days out. I felt like Caylent did care, not just to finish the project, but that our day-to-day business was successful.”
Technologies Used
Caylent Accelerate™ was the agentic delivery methodology applied across the engagement. Additionally, Aurora's migration relied on AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) for server rehosting, AWS Control Tower for landing zone governance, AWS Security Hub configured against CIS, NIST CSF, and HIPAA benchmarks, AWS Backup, AWS Systems Manager, Elastic Load Balancing with AWS WAF protecting public-facing applications, and Amazon Simple Email Service. The environment was codified in Terraform and is managed day-to-day through the AWS Management Console, giving Aurora's team both hands-on control and infrastructure-as-code repeatability as it continues to build out its native AWS footprint.
