Case study
ECE Platform Modernization
See how SquareShift eliminated legacy infrastructure debt for a major bank, upgrading 20 production hosts with a risk-mitigated, DR-first strategy.
A leading global financial services and banking group ran its Elastic Cloud Enterprise platform on infrastructure that had fallen behind on every layer beneath it.
Its control plane sat on ECE 3.1 with a restrictive path to 4.0.x, 20 production hosts still ran RHEL 7 and Docker, and every managed deployment lagged on Elastic Stack 7.17.5 — all under a strict, live-financial-infrastructure mandate of zero data loss and no downtime.
Production hosts re-platformed to RHEL 8 / Podman with zero downtime. Managed deployments upgraded to Elastic Stack 8.x ahead of the ECE 4.0 gate. Data loss or unplanned downtime across the full re-platform.
Key servicesHow SquareShift delivered it.
The challenge
The bank’s Elastic Cloud Enterprise control plane was stuck on ECE 3.1, with only a restrictive, multi-stage path up to the 4.0.x line it needed to reach. Twenty production hosts still ran RHEL 7 and Docker, and every managed customer deployment was pinned to Elastic Stack 7.17.5 — a full major version behind the 8.x coverage the ECE 4.0 upgrade required.
None of those upgrades could happen in isolation, and none of it could happen with any margin for error: this was live financial infrastructure, under a strict mandate of zero data loss and no downtime.
What we delivered
SquareShift ran the modernization as eight DR-first phases, opening each one with a platform secrets and config backup and verified system and customer snapshots before making any change. Hosts moved through ECE maintenance mode one at a time — proxies, allocators, coordinators, and directors migrated role by role from RHEL 7 / Docker to RHEL 8 / Podman, with a health check between every step.
Director migrations preserved ZooKeeper quorum throughout, and the program enforced full Elastic Stack 8.x coverage across every managed deployment before triggering the ECE 4.0 upgrade itself. SquareShift eliminated the legacy infrastructure debt and protected business continuity with this risk-mitigated, DR-first migration strategy — modernizing the ECE control plane and upgrading all 20 hosts with zero downtime and no data loss.
The payoff
All 20 hosts now run RHEL 8 and Podman, and every managed deployment runs Elastic Stack 8.x — clearing the ECE 4.0 hard gate with zero data loss and no unplanned downtime across the entire migration.
The legacy RHEL 7 estate is fully retired, and the ECE control plane is validated on its modernized end state.
On live financial infrastructure, the safest path is rarely the fastest one — migrate role by role behind a verified snapshot, and let every health check earn the next step.
Cloud Modernization Practice Lead, SquareShift
Where this work sits