Northstar's 14-year-old freight transportation management system was built on ColdFusion and ran on bare-metal servers in a single data center. It processed $400M in annual freight volume, but every update was a risk and the team that built it had long since left.
The codebase had no tests, no CI/CD, and no documentation. Deployments were manual and happened quarterly because everyone was afraid of breaking something. The infrastructure cost $180k/month and could not scale for peak shipping seasons.
We ran a strangler-fig migration over 24 months, replacing modules one at a time behind a routing layer so the business never stopped. New services are .NET 8 with React front-ends, deployed to Azure via Terraform with full CI/CD. Kafka handles event streaming between the old and new systems during the transition.
We wrote comprehensive integration tests against production data snapshots before touching any module. Each cutover was a flag flip with instant rollback. The migration included a full observability stack with structured logging, distributed tracing, and alerting.
The migration completed with zero production incidents and zero downtime. Infrastructure costs dropped 68%, from $180k to $58k per month. The ROI broke even in eight months on infra savings alone, before counting developer productivity gains.
We'd been told by three other firms that this migration was a two-year, high-risk project. Techlign did it in two years with zero downtime. Not a single incident.