Case Study: Migrating UKSA’s Monitor your Satellites service to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Moving off the legacy GOV.UK PaaS platform to cloud-native AWS with a 20% cost saving.
The UK Space Agency runs the Monitor Your Satellites service, which tracks UK-registered satellites and alerts operators to potential collisions. This service is critical: without it, operators could miss high-risk events, jeopardising satellite safety and the essential services satellites provide to citizens and businesses.
When the Cabinet Office announced the decommissioning of GOV.UK Platform as a Service (PaaS) in July 2022, UKSA faced the urgent challenge of moving to a new hosting platform. They needed a smooth migration that would avoid service disruption, align with government technical strategies, and ideally deliver cost efficiencies.
Product Manager Mark and Business Analyst Izzy discuss the migration plan
What did The PSC Digital do?
The PSC Digital partnered closely with UKSA, evaluating a range of options before agreeing that AWS was the best fit. Because GOV.UK PaaS was built on AWS, this route offered a smoother transition and strong alignment with wider departmental strategies.
Together, we designed a modern, cloud-native architecture using Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) for compute power. We enhanced functionality by migrating logging to AWS CloudWatch and replacing long-running worker threads with more efficient ECS task scheduling.
We also implemented the migration using Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, ensuring repeatability, transparency, and long-term maintainability. Deployment pipelines were integrated into UKSA’s existing GitHub workflows, allowing teams to continue working in familiar ways.
What did UK Space Agency achieve?
The service successfully migrated before GOV.UK PaaS was decommissioned, ensuring no interruption to satellite monitoring. The move delivered tangible benefits:
- Predicted 20% saving on hosting costs compared to the legacy platform
- Zero-downtime deployments, increasing operational flexibility
- Improved reliability and resilience through AWS ECS functionality not available previously
This migration not only protected a vital national capability but also strengthened it for the future. By embracing modern cloud services, UKSA now has a more reliable, cost-effective, and future-proof system to support its mission of safe satellite operations.
The PSC exists to make public services brilliant. We work with our clients, using data science and user-centred design to co-create new digital services, ensuring they deliver strong financial results, are in harmony with teams and working practices and include everyone. If you would like to speak to our digital team please email us at hello@thepsc.co.uk.