New Relic's Senior Director of Software Engineering, Andrew Hartnett, shared his company's experience with migrating its telemetry data platform to AWS due to explosive growth, which led to scalability barriers and major outages. To overcome these challenges, New Relic used a cell-based architecture to pave the way for long-term scalability and geographic expansion. The company instrumented every part of its system, including the migration process itself, to achieve high observability and visibility into bottlenecks and anomalies. Andrew emphasized the importance of continuously building new cells to improve platform reliability and reclaimed engineering capacity previously spent on infrastructure. He also stressed the need for over-communication with customers during this transition, ensuring they were informed about the reasons behind the changes.