The Challenge

Headquartered in St. Louis, Advocado is a media data platform that connects online and offline audience insights to deliver real-time business intelligence to marketers worldwide. Using patented watermark technology, NLP, and automated content recognition, Advocado helps advertisers instantly measure engagement and adjust campaigns for maximum impact.

As Advocado’s platform grew—particularly after acquiring a media reencoding product in 2021—the company needed to unify its infrastructure, reduce operational costs, and improve scalability for its SaaS platform.

Their existing architecture on AWS Elastic Beanstalk provided a starting point but had critical limitations:

• Limited control over infrastructure provisioning, orchestration, and scalability.
• Inability to easily support complex microservices or on-demand workloads.
• Performance constraints due to rigid configuration and resource allocation.
• High cost from continuously running workloads that didn’t need to stay active.

Advocado needed a flexible, cost-efficient, and containerized architecture that could support future growth and better integrate newly acquired products into a unified AWS environment.

The Solution

Advocado partnered with UTurn Data Solutions, an AWS Advanced Tier Consulting Partner recognized for its experience helping startups and SaaS providers modernize applications on AWS.

UTurn began by conducting a cloud readiness assessment under AWS’s Startup Migration funding program, analyzing Advocado’s application dependencies, compute requirements, and scaling behavior.

The UTurn team compared Advocado’s existing Elastic Beanstalk setup with an AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) on Fargate design—demonstrating the operational and cost advantages of a serverless containerized model.

Key Steps and Deliverables:

• Designed a new containerized architecture using Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate, removing the need to manage servers or pre-provision capacity.
• Built a new AWS landing zone with Terraform Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) for automation, repeatability, and compliance.
• Configured event-driven triggers that automatically start containerized reencoding workloads when new files are received—running only as needed.
• Implemented autoscaling to handle demand spikes and shut down resources after processing, preventing overprovisioning.
• Completed full migration and modernization in under 60 days, ensuring minimal downtime.

By leveraging UTurn’s Rocketry Rapid Launch framework—a library of proven Terraform modules aligned with AWS Well-Architected best practices—UTurn was able to rapidly deploy a secure, scalable, and production-ready AWS environment.

Core AWS Services Used: AWS ECS (Fargate) · Amazon S3 · AWS Lambda (for triggers) · Amazon CloudWatch · AWS IAM · Terraform · Rocketry Rapid Launch Framework

Tech Stack:

AWS ECS (Fargate) · AWS Lambda · Amazon S3 · Amazon CloudWatch · AWS IAM · Terraform · Rocketry Rapid Launch Framework

Measurable Results

In just two months, Advocado’s platform was fully modernized and optimized for future scalability. The migration delivered immediate business and operational benefits:

• Faster deployment: Migration completed in under 60 days with zero disruption to customer services.
• Improved efficiency: Event-driven architecture reduced compute waste and eliminated idle resources.
• Cost savings: Pay-as-you-go container model significantly lowered infrastructure costs (quantify if available).
• Greater scalability: Autoscaling ensures the platform can handle traffic spikes seamlessly across workloads.
• Simplified management: Infrastructure-as-Code reduced manual provisioning and improved consistency.
• Future-ready foundation: Established best-practice AWS architecture ready for ongoing modernization projects.

“UTurn provided excellent communication throughout the project. Their solution architect was extremely knowledgeable and had great explanations for every design decision.”

– Andrew Ellison, Technical Lead, Advocado

Why UTurn

Advocado chose UTurn for its deep AWS expertise, structured Rocketry Rapid Launch approach, and ability to balance speed with security and scalability. UTurn’s consultative partnership helped Advocado modernize its infrastructure quickly and effectively—empowering its teams to innovate faster, scale intelligently, and control costs as their platform evolves.

Today, UTurn continues to support Advocado through ongoing modernization and security initiatives, including additional Elastic Beanstalk-to-ECS migrations and governance enhancements delivered through UTurn’s Rocketry Rapid Launch and Architect-in-Residence programs.

Ready to modernize your cloud environment for speed, scale, and efficiency? Partner with UTurn to accelerate your AWS migration and realize the full potential of a modern, event-driven architecture.