CASE STUDY
North American HR tech vendor modernizes a black-box monolith on AWS
The client is a software company focused on HR and payroll, operating in North America. The company serves over 100,000 clients, including small and mid-sized businesses as well as large enterprises.
CAST Imaging enabled the client to obtain clear documentation and regain knowledge of its application's inner workings within one week, offering new modernization perspectives and reducing the modernization planning timeline by 25%.
It has been very beneficial to the team to have CAST during the modernization journey. The only thing they wish is that they could have had it even sooner.
VP of Engineering
25% time
savings
in modernization
provisioning
1 week
to reveal modernization
solutions
2 million
lines of code of legacy
technologies
Challenge
The client's core business application, consisting of over two million lines of code in legacy technologies like ASP/VB.NET, C#, and SQL Server databases, is already running on AWS. The client sought to modernize it to better serve customers, regain control, and leverage AWS native services.
However, none of the developers who had built, maintained, or enhanced the application over the years were available, and no up-to-date documentation existed to guide the migration plan.
Without a clear understanding of the application's inner workings, the team was unable to decide whether to rewrite or port parts of it. Faced with this complexity, they considered starting from scratch and conducting a manual analysis, which was estimated to take two experienced developers 10 months.
Solution
The HR Tech vendor leveraged CAST Imaging’s semantic analysis of application source code, which automatically provides deep insights into the application's inner workings. This enabled them to regain control of the application and identify new paths for modernization.
CAST Imaging automatically mapped the application's architecture, enabling the client to clearly understand the interactions between different layers, including the UI, core services, and data storage. It also identified all dependencies, not only between these layers but also among the components and their individual elements.
Additionally, CAST Imaging highlighted a significant number of unused database entities and uncovered over 650,000 lines of source code in stored procedures actively being used.
Results
In just one week, the client benefited from this comprehensive, insight-driven approach, leading to the discovery of solutions for modernizing the application. The initial decision to rewrite components is now being reconsidered in favor of re-platforming or containerization alternatives, boosting the client’s confidence to proceed with modernization on AWS.
This clear understanding of application dependencies also yielded additional benefits. The development team knows how to break apart the application into pieces safely, increasing performance and meeting AWS native application requirements.
Additionally, the initial two-year provisioning for modernization has been revised to one and a half years – a 25% time saving – to better serve customers and fully benefit from AWS services.
