LSD Open has become one of the first partners in Africa qualified to deliver AWS Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA), a hands-on, immersive delivery approach designed to replace months of analysis paralysis with real-time execution.

Any cloud project – whether an initial migration, a modernisation push or a brand-new innovation initiative – is notoriously prone to stalling. These delays, especially during large-scale transformations, are a well-documented headache across the tech industry. The AWS EBA is engineered to break exactly this deadlock.

So, what is the EBA?

At its core, an AWS Experience-Based Acceleration is a high-octane, hands-on agile working session designed to replace months of theoretical planning with a few days of energetic, real-time execution.

Think of it less as a traditional workshop and more as an engineering sprint with a strict production focus. It is effective because it actively dismantles the typical corporate friction – silos, endless approval loops and analysis paralysis – by locking cross-functional teams, security stakeholders and AWS and partner experts in a room, virtual or physical, to collaborate, unblock and deploy code together.

Depending on where a business sits in its cloud evolution, the framework adapts into three targeted tracks: a Migration EBA to rapidly shift heavy workloads and core databases to the cloud; a MODAX (modernisation) EBA to refactor legacy applications into agile, containerised or serverless architectures; and an Innovation EBA designed to rapidly prototype and launch greenfield digital features.

Here is what teams actually achieve when executing an EBA framework, as seen in our recent engagement:

Instant deadlock breaking: Blockers that usually take weeks of back-and-forth email chains are resolved in minutes, because every key decision-maker and engineer clears their calendar to focus entirely on a single mission.
Working infrastructure, not slideshows: Teams don’t walk away with a static strategy document or an unexecuted deck of architectural diagrams. They leave with databases migrated, secure clusters provisioned and live CI/CD pipelines running natively in the cloud.
Repeatable migration patterns: The code, automated runbooks and baseline landing-zone guardrails built during the sprint function as reusable, plug-and-play templates that other internal application teams can immediately use to scale future workloads.
A modernised way of working: It fundamentally rewires internal team culture. By pushing developers, platform engineers and security squads towards hyper-focused daily milestones, it builds lasting structural synergy and establishes a blueprint for high-velocity delivery long after the EBA ends.

What we have helped clients achieve so far with the EBA framework

Instead of trying to modernise everything at once, the team picked a single service to prove the approach. Using LSD Open’s AI-Accelerated App Modernisation method, it took an ageing legacy codebase and used AI to automatically rewrite it off an outdated framework (.NET 3.5) and onto a modern, ultra-fast platform (.NET 8) running in agile cloud containers, before spending focused engineering time making it production-ready. Work of this kind would traditionally take 18 to 24 months. The team had a working prototype in 3 days, with a clear path to production in 3 to 4 months. This is now one of our go-to offerings, because we can take the time and cost out of modernising old applications. Something that would once have taken years and cost millions can now be done in months, with the help of AWS Transform and good engineering practices from our team.

Legacy applications running on IIS on Windows virtual machines were migrated into containers on Windows nodes in Amazon EKS. The migration was completed inside the 3-day window, ran successfully from day one and immediately delivered 40% lower CPU utilisation. Core workloads that previously consumed half of their on-premises computing power now run at just a quarter of it, directly translating into a substantial reduction in ongoing cloud infrastructure costs – the client is now doing twice the work for a fraction of the cost.

A complex web of hundreds of interconnected software endpoints was upgraded in under 24 hours, work that would ordinarily drag out across months of development cycles. High-risk 1am system maintenance windows were replaced entirely with automated, risk-free background updates that roll out silently with zero user downtime – a change the engineering team summed up simply: “It gives our people their weekends back.”

Why modernisation stalls

For most organisations, the hard part of moving to the cloud is not the technology. Around 70% of the friction in a cloud transformation is organisational and cultural, not technical: siloed teams, competing priorities, ticket queues and legacy operating models that quietly stretch a six-month plan into a two-year one.

EBA is built to cut through that. By putting cross-functional teams in one room, in real time, with the authority to make decisions and the engineering support to act on them, it replaces months of back-and-forth with days of shipping. LSD Open runs as many EBA sessions as are required, with teams anywhere in the world, in person or remotely. A recent EBA was run with one team in person in Johannesburg and remote teams in Cape Town, Singapore and Europe. Bringing in the subject-matter experts from AWS and LSD Open, we are able to move fast and unblock problems as soon as they arise.

Looking ahead

The goal behind LSD Open’s qualification is to unlock value faster for clients, making migration, modernisation and innovation more effective, better able to meet business requirements and, ultimately, more successful. As part of this, we aim to run 10 EBAs over the next 18 months and to help as many clients as possible make use of this framework.

About LSD Open
LSD Open is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, Well-Architected and Amazon EKS Delivery Partner, with more than 25 years of engineering heritage in open source, Linux, Kubernetes and modern cloud platforms. The company helps organisations across Africa and the Middle East modernise their applications and data, move off costly legacy architecture, and build production-grade, AI-ready platforms on AWS.

LSD Open delivers measurable cloud outcomes through two engineering-led journeys – Cloud Modernisation, and AI and Data Innovation – and works with many of the region’s largest banks, insurers, telcos and digital-native businesses. With teams in South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and beyond, LSD Open is the execution partner enterprises turn to when modernisation has to actually happen.

Accelerate your innovation journey at lsdopen.io.