Ascend, from +600 Windows servers to a modern AWS platform

About Ascend

Ascend Fundraising Solutions (AscendFS Inc.) is a Canadian technology company helping charitable organizations raise more funds through digital, software-driven fundraising programs. Its cloud-based SaaS platform powers 50/50 draws, sweepstakes, and Catch-the-Ace lotteries for more than 800 charities and foundations worldwide. Ascend needed to modernize a Windows-centric, instance-per-tenant architecture that no longer scaled efficiently as its customer base grew.

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How Cloutive made an impact

Ascend reached out to Cloutive to modernize a platform that had scaled to +400 customer organizations on +600 dedicated Windows EC2 instances and SQL Server databases driving high licensing costs, manual provisioning, and no CI/CD. Cloutive supported them in several ways:

• Refactoring and containerizing the .NET application to run as .NET 8 services on Amazon ECS (Fargate), eliminating Windows Server and IIS dependency.
• Migrating SQL Server databases to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL using AWS SCT and DMS, removing SQL Server licensing costs and enabling multi-tenant scalability.
• Implementing Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation, CDK) and automated CI/CD pipelines (CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy), with centralized observability via CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and Secrets Manager.

The results

• 20%Monthly Cost Reduction
• 75%Fewer Manual Ops Tasks
• 30%Better CPU Utilization
• 20%Faster Deployments

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Why Cloutive

Ascend chose Cloutive for its deep AWS expertise, hands-on delivery, and experience modernizing complex Windows-based SaaS workloads. Cloutive acted as an extension of Ascend's engineering team technical assessment, POC validating the full modernization pathway, and a production-grade AWS-native architecture delivered without disruption to a mission-critical platform. Ongoing relationship continues via Cloutive's DevOps-as-a-Service model.