In a large enterprise with hundreds of codebases, staying current is a constant, expensive battle. The old way—relying on developers to track updates, manually apply breaking changes, and painstakingly following migration guides—simply doesn't scale. It's a recipe for security risks, technical debt, and developer burnout. Our team was drowning in this manual toil, so we built a better way.

This session details our journey to create an automated dependency upgrade machine. We'll start with how we deployed Renovate bot across the enterprise to solve the discovery problem, automatically creating hundreds of pull requests to keep our services on the latest versions. But as any engineer knows, version bumps are the easy part. The real challenge is the breaking changes.

This is where we turned to OpenRewrite. We'll dive deep into how we use this powerful automated refactoring tool to codify the complex, repetitive steps of major upgrades. You'll see how we compose open-source recipes and write our own custom recipes to handle everything from framework migrations to code cleanup and enforcing internal best practices. We'll share our successes, our failures, and the hard-won lessons of testing and deploying these recipes at scale. You will leave with a blueprint to stop treating upgrades as expensive, manual projects and start treating them as what they should be: a continuous, automated, and safe background process.