MachShip: Powering Freight Management at Scale with a Future-Ready AWS Cloud Foundation

Organisations experiencing rapid growth often reach a point where their infrastructure can no longer keep pace with business ambitions. Scaling operations, improving reliability, and creating a foundation for future innovation become critical to sustaining competitive advantage. 

MachShip, an Australian freight management SaaS platform, faced exactly this challenge. To address expanding customer demand and support its next phase of growth, the company needed a scalable, secure, and future-ready cloud foundation.

About MachShip

MachShip provides a sophisticated freight management platform connecting with over 500 carriers across Australia and New Zealand. It enables day-to-day users, including freight partners, 3PLs and operations teams at large enterprises, to manage shipments efficiently, optimise delivery workflows, and maintain visibility across supply chains. Its platform is mission-critical for logistics operations, directly impacting its customers’ ability to meet service commitments and maintain trust with their own clients.

The Challenge: Navigating a Confluence of Pressures and Opportunities

For MachShip, the decision to modernise the cloud was driven by a combination of external market pressures, impending infrastructure deadlines, and a clear internal strategic vision. Understanding these multifaceted drivers was critical to designing a solution that addressed not just the immediate technical needs but also the long-term business objectives of a high-growth logistics leader.

• • Scaling for a High-Growth Market: The existing infrastructure lacked the elasticity to quickly handle increasing transaction volumes, creating clear scaling limitations that put the company at risk of a competitive disadvantage.

• External Infrastructure Deadlines: MachShip faced external changes in its hosting and licensing environment that introduced firm migration deadlines and new cost considerations. These factors accelerated the need for a modern, cloud-based foundation with an ambitious three-month completion timeline.

To overcome this confluence of challenges and realise their ambitious vision, MachShip partnered with DNX to execute a precise modernisation program.

The Solution: A Strategic Partnership for Seamless Transformation

The project’s success depended on more than just technical execution; it required a true partnership designed to de-risk a complex transformation, deliver a future-proof platform, and empower the MachShip team for long-term success. DNX’s approach focused on a collaborative, milestone-driven methodology that balanced speed with meticulous planning and risk mitigation.

• Automated AWS Landing Zone: A multi-account AWS environment built using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for consistency, repeatability, and version-controlled management. This ensured MachShip could deploy and manage infrastructure reliably while maintaining enterprise-grade security standards aligned with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 principles.

• High Availability Architecture: Multi-AZ, three-tier architecture providing fault tolerance, redundancy, and business continuity for critical workloads.

• Secure and Resilient Networking: Complex VPC design with Direct Connect, resilient failover, and integration of existing DDoS/WAF protections to safeguard operational continuity.

• Phased Approach to De-Risk a Complex Migration: To meet the ambitious three-month timeline while minimising risk, the project followed a structured, phased roadmap that provided clarity and ensured alignment at every stage.

1. 1. Program Establishment & Workshops: The engagement kicked off with deep-dive discovery workshops to analyse the current architecture, define the future state, and align all stakeholders on a shared migration strategy.
   2. AWS Foundation: With the blueprint established, DNX deployed the core, automated AWS landing zone, creating a secure and scalable environment ready to receive workloads.
   3. Migration Pilot: Before the full-scale migration, a nominated workload was moved to the new platform. This pilot served to test and refine the migration plan, creating a repeatable, low-risk process for the subsequent waves.
   4. Migration Execution: The final migration was executed using a shared responsibility model. The empowered MachShip team executed the migration waves while DNX provided expert guidance and real-time support to ensure a smooth and successful transition.

• Knowledge Transfer & Upskilling: A core principle of the engagement was a collaborative partnership focused on upskilling the MachShip team. This hands-on, knowledge-transfer approach fostered a culture of collaboration and ensured long-term self-sufficiency.

The Outcomes: Delivering Mission-Critical Reliability and Enabling Growth

The success of the MachShip modernisation project was measured not by the completion of technical tasks, but by the tangible business outcomes it delivered. The transformation yielded a strategic platform to fuel future growth and innovation.

Achieving a Seamless Transition

For MachShip, the ultimate measure of success was a migration that was “largely invisible to the customer.” The entire infrastructure transition was completed with minimal customer impact, maintaining reliability throughout the transition. This seamless execution demonstrated the reliability of the new AWS environment from day one and solidified the trust of MachShip’s extensive customer base.

Agility and Scale for Sustainable Growth

The new AWS infrastructure directly addressed MachShip’s core business objective: enabling rapid and sustainable growth. The scalable, container-based Amazon EKS environment provides the technical capability to handle continued year-on-year growth. This modernisation allows for faster deployment of new features and gives the company a significant competitive advantage in a dynamic market.

A Future-Ready, Self-Sufficient Team

Beyond the immediate technical benefits, the project delivered long-term strategic value by equipping MachShip for the future.

• Internal Expertise: Through a deliberate focus on knowledge transfer, the MachShip team is now fully enabled to sustain, manage, and optimise the AWS environment independently.
• Foundation for Analytics: The platform is now ready for future data analytics and business intelligence initiatives, empowering MachShip to leverage its vast operational data for data-driven decision-making.
• Reduced Technical Debt: Moving to a modern, cloud-native stack positions the company to innovate faster, avoiding the long-term limitations of legacy infrastructure.

Next Steps

The partnership between MachShip and DNX delivered not just a seamless migration but a comprehensive business transformation. MachShip’s journey shows how external pressures and tight deadlines can become catalysts for innovation, empowering teams to modernise with confidence. By focusing on business continuity, automation, and internal capability, they built a resilient, scalable, and future-ready foundation to support MachShip’s next phase of growth as a leader in freight management technology.