Codelitt was a software development agency that built custom software for clients: web and mobile applications, automation, IoT, and machine learning projects. A globally distributed team of about 30 developers ran client applications on AWS and DigitalOcean. In the early days, deploying meant logging into a server and running a docker run command. As the project portfolio grew, the team layered on automation scripts, and maintaining those scripts turned into writing full Linux server tutorials for junior developers. That approach was unsustainable, so Codelitt moved its deployments to Heroku.
Codelitt switched to Heroku to fix deployment, and new problems appeared. Lock-in was one of the biggest problems. With no ownership of the underlying infrastructure, moving an application elsewhere meant rebuilding its environments from scratch. Privacy-conscious clients objected to hosting sensitive projects on Heroku at all. Costs compounded it. The $7 per month entry price worked for small projects, but each new resource jumped to $25. Per-stage pricing forced a separate application for each stage of the development lifecycle, which meant three servers per project. Developers spent real time monitoring what was running and shutting down unused resources just to hold the bill down. Codelitt wanted to consolidate onto DigitalOcean and own its infrastructure outright, and Heroku offered no path to that.
Codelitt evaluated its options for migrating off Heroku on one axis: automation. Two requirements shaped the shortlist: the team wanted server ownership without taking on in-house management of AWS resources, and it wanted to keep its existing deployment pipelines built on GitHub Actions for code updates and deploys. Convox met both, and existing processes carried over with minimal disruption. After the migration, most servers and racks ran on DigitalOcean, with AWS in the mix where it fit a project, and developers created racks for production, QA, and staging as each project required.
In the months after the migration, Codelitt reported a roughly 50% reduction in infrastructure costs, with development and staging costs down an estimated 60 to 75%. The saving came from paying for server usage instead of per application, and from reusing resources on demand rather than shutting applications off to control spend. Applications could move across infrastructure without rebuilding environments from scratch. That footprint covered 30 developers, 10 separate development projects, and 50 different services, with one engineer spending a few hours a month on DevOps and no dedicated DevOps hire. One formerly slow task, changing data collection sources, came down to one developer adding a Dockerfile, taking 30 minutes to 2 hours despite limited Docker experience.
The figures above are Codelitt's own estimates, reported in the months after the migration. The reliability claim is time-bounded: the team reported no incidents and no downtime across its products in the four months following the transition. The cost comparison also includes a hosting change, since most servers and racks were hosted on DigitalOcean after the migration. And Convox did not remove the need for Docker knowledge; it made routine Docker tasks manageable for developers with limited experience. Read the numbers as an agency's snapshot from the period after its move, not as guarantees.
Kaio Magalhaes, Codelitt's Chief Technical Officer at the time of the migration, summed up what the move bought the team. In his words: "With Convox we're now able to be cloud agnostic and offer the best of each cloud provider to our clients while spending 100% of the time on where it matters, building products."
