This session shares lessons from modernizing a large, regulated enterprise platform from a legacy, tightly coupled architecture to a Kubernetes-based cloud-native environment. The journey involved decomposing monolithic services, introducing containerized workloads, and establishing a platform foundation that balanced developer autonomy with enterprise governance, security controls, and audit requirements.

We will cover practical design decisions around cluster architecture, workload isolation, CI/CD standardization, policy enforcement, and observability at scale. The talk also discusses what did not work, including early assumptions about service boundaries, release coordination across multiple teams, and friction with platform adoption.

From a business perspective, the modernization enabled faster release cycles, improved platform reliability, better resource utilization, and reduced operational risk in a compliance-heavy domain. Attendees will gain concrete patterns, architectural tradeoffs, and operational lessons they can apply when modernizing critical enterprise systems on Kubernetes.