The operational cost was visible in every metric that mattered. Build times were slow. Deployment frequency was lower than the business needed. Security posture was inconsistent, with application vulnerabilities lacking systematic detection or remediation. Technical debt had accumulated to the point where maintaining the existing systems consumed engineering capacity that should have been directed at product innovation.
Realtor.com needed more than incremental fixes. It needed a single, standardized, cloud-native foundation that would let engineering teams ship faster, operate more reliably, and scale confidently as the business grew.
Solution
Brillio had already led several modernization initiatives across Realtor.com’s broader enterprise, which meant our team came with earned context and an established governance relationship. That existing partnership mattered. It shortened the discovery phase and gave both teams a shared language for priorities, dependencies, and risk tolerance.
The technical migration centered on moving multiple workloads from team-managed AWS ECS clusters to centrally governed AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) environments. Repositories were migrated from GitHub Enterprise to GitHub Cloud. The shift to EKS introduced unified governance and enhanced observability across the full development lifecycle, replacing the fragmented cluster model with a consistent operational baseline.
The CI/CD overhaul was equally significant. Jenkins was replaced with CircleCI. GitHub, CircleCI, and ArgoCD became the new standard for build and deployment orchestration, with reusable pipeline templates and environment-based configuration reducing per-team maintenance burden and increasing release velocity. Infrastructure provisioning was automated using AWS CloudFormation templates for consistent, compliant environment creation. Container images were consolidated in AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR) to strengthen security and simplify lifecycle management.
Security was addressed structurally, not as an afterthought. Automated scanning and CI/CD-integrated compliance gates resolved application security issues systematically. We also executed a disciplined legacy retirement program, decommissioning underutilized workloads and reducing the technical debt load that had been compounding for years.
Delivery ran on a two-week agile cadence powered by Brillio’s Codex platform. Program Increment (PI)-based planning workshops kept Realtor.com and our teams aligned on modernization priorities and success metrics throughout execution.
