Application Modernization
The core application is a monolith that's slow to change, hard to test, and every new feature takes longer than the last because nobody fully understands how the pieces interact anymore.
How we tackle it
We favor incremental extraction (the strangler-fig pattern) over a full rewrite: new functionality is built as separate services from day one, and existing functionality is extracted from the monolith piece by piece behind a routing layer, so the business keeps shipping features throughout. Service boundaries are chosen based on business domain and team ownership, not just technical convenience, since a decomposition that doesn't match how teams actually work just creates a distributed monolith with extra network hops.
Current-state pain points
- Feature delivery has slowed as the codebase has grown
- Deploys require coordinating across the whole application even for small changes
- Test suite is slow, flaky, or has large untested areas
- Outdated framework or language versions block adoption of modern tooling
- Previous rewrite attempt was abandoned partway through
What is in scope
- Codebase and dependency assessment, identifying seams for decomposition
- Modernization strategy: strangler-fig extraction vs. targeted refactor vs. selective rewrite
- Service boundary design aligned to team ownership and business domains
- CI/CD pipeline modernization to support incremental, independent delivery
- Data layer strategy for decomposed services (shared DB transition, event-driven sync)
- Test coverage improvement for areas being extracted or refactored
Who it is for
- Teams whose monolith has become a bottleneck for feature velocity
- Organizations wanting to decompose a system incrementally, not through a risky rewrite
- Companies on outdated frameworks or languages that limit hiring and library support
- Engineering leaders needing to modernize while the business keeps shipping features
Prerequisites
- Read access to the existing codebase and its CI/CD configuration
- A product/business stakeholder available to prioritize which domains to extract first
- Tolerance for running legacy and new services in parallel during transition
- A team that will own extracted services after the engagement
What you end up owning
Artifacts land in your repositories and cloud accounts, with documentation to match.
- Codebase assessment identifying decomposition seams and risk areas
- Modernization roadmap sequenced by business value and technical risk
- Extracted services with defined boundaries, APIs, and independent deploy pipelines
- Data migration/synchronization strategy between legacy and new services
- Updated CI/CD pipelines supporting independent service delivery
- Test coverage report and improvement plan for critical extraction paths
- Documentation of new service boundaries and ownership
How the work is sequenced
Assessment & Roadmap
Analyze the codebase for natural seams, assess risk, and sequence a modernization roadmap by business value.
Strangler-Fig Setup
Introduce a routing layer that allows new and extracted functionality to run alongside the existing monolith.
Incremental Extraction
Extract services one domain at a time, each with its own CI/CD pipeline and test coverage, validating in production before moving to the next.
Data Layer Transition
Migrate or synchronize data access for extracted services, moving away from shared-database coupling where it constrains independent deployment.
Consolidation & Handover
Retire fully migrated monolith code paths, document new boundaries, and hand over ownership to product teams.
What we typically use
Routing & Strangler Pattern
Service Architecture
CI/CD
Data Layer
What changes when this is done
Qualitative outcomes only. Any figures depend entirely on your estate, and we will not quote them before measuring.
- Feature delivery speed improves as services can be deployed independently
- Reduced blast radius per deploy since services are decoupled
- Modernized technology stack that supports current hiring and tooling needs
- Improved test coverage in the areas most critical to the business
- A working decomposition pattern the team can continue applying after handover
Common questions
Related service
Other solutions
Cloud Migration
Move workloads off legacy or on-prem infrastructure onto AWS, Azure, or GCP without disrupting the business.
Platform Engineering & Internal Developer Platforms
Give developers self-service infrastructure so platform and DevOps teams stop being a bottleneck.
Infrastructure Automation & IaC
Replace manual, console-driven infrastructure changes with version-controlled, reviewable Terraform.
Talk to the engineers who would do the work
Bring your current architecture, constraints and the problem you are trying to solve. We will tell you what we would change first, what it depends on, and where we would start.