We Moved a Production System from Azure VMs to Bare Metal Kubernetes in 3 Months

This wasn’t one of those long, overplanned migrations that drag on for years. It took us about three months from start to finish, and most of that time was spent being careful rather than building something complicated. The system we inherited was running on Azure with multiple VMs, a self-managed MySQL instance, and a load balancer in front. It had all the symptoms of something that had grown without a plan. Everything was configured manually. No infrastructure as code, no containers, no orchestration. If something broke, someone would log into a machine and try to fix it directly, which worked until it didn’t. The biggest issues always showed up under load. The database would start locking, queries would slow down, and parts of the system would just stop responding. Not crash, just hang long enough to cause real problems. CPU usage would spike on certain machines while others stayed underutilized. There was no real way to scale or redistribute load cleanly. During peak hours, especia