Modern developers know about microservices, they know about cloud native software, they want to build new microservices in cloud native technologies using the latest patterns.

Unfortunately many of us have massive legacy applications with heaps of tech debt, badly defined modules and spaghetti messes of code.

How do you modernise a legacy application? What choices are you likely to face and what are some strategies for making good decisions?

At Livi we migrated a large, on-premise legacy application to the cloud.

In this talk, we look at the challenges we faced, the hurdles we overcame (and some we didn’t), and the thinking behind the choices we made throughout our journey.

We will look at how we leveraged api patterns to solve problems with complexity, modern frameworks to solve, or at least hide, legacy code and cloud-native technologies to provide security and observability across the entire application. We will also analyse some of the options we didn’t use, and discuss why.

First delivered at QCon London 2024.
This is a 50 minute talk.