Lessons Learned

In part 3 of the blog series, I talked about how we transformed our Windows-only .NET Framework app to a containerized multi-platform .NET Core app. This removed our dependency on Windows and enabled us to deploy to Linux-based platforms such as App Engine (Flex). On the other hand, the app still ran on VMs, it was billed per second even if nobody used it, deployments were slow and most importantly, it was a single monolith that was deployed and scaled as a single unit. Read More →

In part 1, I talked about the initial app and its challenges. In part 2, I talked about the lift & shift to the cloud with some unexpected benefits. In this part 3 of the series, I’ll talk about how we transformed our Windows-only .NET Framework app to a containerized multi-platform .NET Core app and the huge benefits we got along the way. Why? The initial Windows VM based cloud setup served us well with minimal issues about roughly 2 years (from early 2017 to early 2019). Read More →

In part 1 of app modernization series, I introduced a simple news aggregator and some of the challenges in its initial architecture. In part 2, I’ll talk about the journey to the cloud and some unexpected benefits and learnings along the way. Why Cloud? The initial backend had many issues that I outlined in part 1. After about 1 year, in late 2016, we decided to look into moving it to a more stable home. Read More →

We all have apps running some “legacy code” in some “legacy way”. The term “legacy” means different things in different projects but we know when we see it and we want to get the time to modernize those apps in some way. I recently went through the latest phase of modernization of a legacy app. Even though it’s a relatively small app, it thought me a number of lessons that’s worth sharing. Read More →