How Enterprise App Modernization Boosted Response Times by 85% & Delivered $72K Annual Savings

Client at a Glance

• Company: Mid-sized Technology Services Company (sponsor/implementation partner)
  
• End Client: City agency managing burial grounds (non-technical organization)
  
• Industry: Public sector / City services
  
• Core Services: Custom software development, legacy system maintenance, enterprise solutions
  

Executive Summary

• Objective: Modernize a decade-old monolith into a scalable, secure, cloud-native platform—without disrupting operations and while improving reliability, performance, and cost.
  
• Problem: A monolithic, deprecated stack (AngularJS, legacy Django packages, CentOS 7 EOL) caused security exposure, performance bottlenecks (3.2s avg response), fragile deployments (staging+prod on same server), and slow onboarding.
  
• Approach: Phased event-driven microservices on AWS with containerization and Kubernetes; Redis caching; CI/CD; comprehensive security hardening; and Dockerized dev environments.
  
• Impact: 85% faster response (3.2s → 0.5s), 99.9% uptime (from 94%), 40% lower infra costs ($15K/mo → $9K/mo; $72K/year savings), 10× concurrent users (100 → 1,000+), 97% fewer vulnerabilities (458 → 12 low-severity), deployments cut from weeks to 15 minutes.
  

Situation & Complication

A non-technical city agency relied on an aging, monolithic burial-grounds application with limited documentation and fragmented architecture. The result:

• Security risks: 58 backend + 400+ frontend issues (incl. injections, insecure cookies, deprecated modules).
  
• Operational risk: Staging and production on the same server; brittle releases.
  
• Performance drag: Synchronous DB access, no effective caching; 3.2s average response times.
  
• Scalability limits: Tightly coupled code prevented independent scaling.
  
• Velocity constraints: Weeks to onboard developers and ship changes.
  

Business impact: Slow user experience, elevated downtime risk, rising costs, and inability to scale or integrate with partners.