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SaaS / Data integration

Monolith to microservices with zero downtime

A half-million-line legacy monolith had become a bottleneck for a SaaS company: slow releases, outage risk in every deploy and engineers who did not want to work on the stack. We migrated it to microservices incrementally, without a single planned outage.

ClientB2B data-integration SaaS (confidential)
IndustrySaaS / Data integration
What we deliveredArchitecture, migration engineering, DevOps
Monolith to microservices with zero downtime
ZeroPlanned downtime during migration
DaysFeature deployment, down from weeks
99.9%+Uptime after migration

01 The challenge

Feature releases took weeks because everything shipped together and everything could break together. A single failure could take down the whole product. Hiring for the ageing technology was getting harder, and a big-bang rewrite was too risky for a business with customers depending on the product every day.

02 What we did

  • Strangler-fig migration: new services built around the monolith's edges and traffic shifted gradually behind an API gateway
  • Domain-driven service boundaries agreed with the product team before any code moved
  • Data migration with dual-writes and reconciliation so nothing was lost during cut-over
  • CI/CD per service with automated tests, canary releases and instant rollback
  • Platform observability so a service problem stays a service problem

03 The results

  • Feature deployment time cut from weeks to days
  • Engineering productivity roughly doubled
  • Uptime improved to well above 99.9%
  • Senior engineers hired more easily on the modern stack

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