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Imagine finding out your core platform contract is ending, leaving you with a multi million-dollar liability—and just 10 months to move 1,500 critical workloads. That was the reality for the engineering team at State Farm.
While they had previously used Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and VMware vSphere, the underlying platform was highly proprietary. To escape vendor lock-in and secure long-term cloud portability, State Farm executed an urgent, 10-month race to migrate 1,500 workloads to Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), all without disrupting core business operations.
Figure 1. Burt Lappe, Engineering Manager, and Vamsi Nainavarapu, Senior Technology Engineer at State Farm, Sean Malloy, OpenShift Technical Account Manager, Red Hat, presenting at Red Hat Summit 2026
To pull off this shift, the engineering team first had to clear significant roadblocks. For a major insurance provider, a traditional full stack cloud strategy introduced operational hurdles. Only the top 10% to 20% of software engineers possessed the infrastructure knowledge required to manage security groups, identity and access management, and underlying cloud plumbing. The remaining majority of developers faced extreme cognitive load, distracting them from building core business capabilities.
