Legacy desktop app re-platformed
As containerized .NET on AWS.
Case study – Travel & Hospitality
Dormakaba's Ambiance Cloud
Dormakaba's access-management software ran as a Windows .NET application installed on a server at every hotel front desk. To compete with cloud-native rivals, Dormakaba needed it modernized, containerized and delivered through a proper pipeline without disrupting the estate of 26,000+ hotels already running it. 56k.Cloud delivered that migration under the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP).
The problem
Ambiance is business-critical: it manages door access for an estate of over 26,000 hotels. But it shipped as an on-premise Windows .NET application, installed and run separately at each customer site. As competing hotel-management solutions moved to the cloud, Dormakaba needed to demonstrate a cloud version of its own — with real hotels onboarded — while keeping every existing installation working on-premises. This was Dormakaba's first migration to AWS, and the team was up front about the gaps and years of application edge cases to preserve.
- Keep 26,000+ on-prem hotel installations running throughout the migration.
- A multi-tenant cloud version with proper data isolation between hotels.
- Support both the desktop and the cloud version for years to come.
- Edge workloads that still have to run locally at the hotel.
- Disaster recovery and a security posture fit for access control.
The solution
56k.Cloud re-platformed Ambiance from a Windows desktop application into containerized .NET services running on Linux in Amazon ECS / Fargate. State moved to a multi-tenant Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database, with Amazon MQ (RabbitMQ) for messaging and Amazon ElastiCache (Redis) for caching. Amazon Cognito handles identity and tenant separation, Amazon API Gateway fronts the services, and the frontend is served from Amazon S3 via Amazon CloudFront. For the workloads that still belong at the hotel, an Ambiance Cloud Gateway edge device connects through AWS IoT Core and Greengrass. The whole estate is provisioned with Infrastructure-as-Code, built and deployed through CI/CD pipelines that run unit, integration and acceptance tests on every merge, and observed end-to-end in an observability platform.
The outcome
A legacy desktop application, re-platformed to the Cloud and running in production for thousands of customers.
Multi-tenant Ambiance Cloud
Onboards new hotels without a per-site install.
Repeatable CI/CD pipeline
Replacing manual, build-time-configured deployments.
Desktop and cloud, side by side
Both versions supported while hotels move over.
Edge workloads kept local
At the hotel, via an IoT-connected Cloud Gateway.
Delivered under AWS MAP
Assess, Mobilize, then Migrate & Modernize with a Well-Architected review across all six pillars, roughly half AWS-co-funded.