Zero-Downtime Migration of Legacy Services to Kubernetes

With radically compressed deployment cycles and 99.9% uptime.

USA

LOCATION

Financial Services

INDUSTRY

Kubernetes Migration

Service Provided

01. The CLIENT

About the Client

BUSINESS

Our client, a seasoned financial services institution, had critically important customer-facing applications hosted on legacy virtual machines and deployed manually.

BACKGROUND

Each new release with even minor updates required scheduled downtime, frustrating both engineers and end users.

02. The Project Challenge

INITIAL REQUEST

As the client’s initial vision was focused on exploring migration and modernization options for a more reliable system with flexible demands for reliability and faster delivery of new features. Maven Solutions has researched the options for updating the infrastructure for the legacy programs and offered to explore Kubernetes as the solution.

THE CHALLENGE

The client's biggest pain point was that critically important customer-facing applications depended on manual business processes. Each new release with even a minor update required scheduled downtime, frustrating both engineers and end users.

Also, traffic volumes kept expanding, while the existing infrastructure was already struggling under the current activity levels. Exploring migration and modernization options for a more reliable system with flexible demands for reliability and faster delivery of new features.

The client sought a solution that would:

01

Transform deployments from slow, manual, and error-prone to fast, automated, and reliable.

02

Reduce or eliminate scheduled downtime during feature releases updates.

03

Ensure infrastructure scalability to meet the needs of current and future activity levels.

03. The SOLUTION

PROJECT SOLUTION

Our Strategic Approach

One possible solution, web application architecture, would not be able to support the scaling requirements the client sought. It would have been an improvement over client's existing infrastructure, but not scalable enough for optimistic scenarios.

The solution that the client accepted was to migrate key services onto a fully functional platform around the initial core solution into an architecture that was capable of housing all of the customer's current and future applications.

To organize the development process, Maven Solutions has offered to use the Disciplined Agile Delivery method:
1.Three project phases: Inception, Construction, Transition
2. The freedom to choose any appropriate processes and methodology
3. A combination of Agile and classic project management approaches
4. The focus on the business value of each delivery, not just on development processes

Inception

We offered to map the future infrastructure vision with steps, timelines, and resources needed to achieve them. Maven Solutions designed and executed a phased migration plan that would guarantee zero-downtime for every scenario. This included a full assessment of the client’s services, dependencies, and traffic.

Construction

This helped us define migration stages, starting with lower-risk services to validate the process before moving critical workloads. Each step was supported with a rollback strategy for business continuity. Infrastructure was fully codified using Terraform and Helm, ensuring reproducibility and version control across environments. Kubernetes clusters were provisioned for staging and production, allowing us to test workloads in parallel before moving traffic.

Transition

Implementing canary deployment strategy helped avoid cutover downtime. This approach enabled new services to run alongside existing ones, with traffic gradually walked over after automated health checks confirmed stability. We prepared rollbacks in case of any issues.

Process Modernization

Maven Solutions introduced a robust CI/CD pipeline as a replacement for manual deployments. With automated builds, tests, and releases, the client’s teams could now deploy code changes multiple times per day with confidence, with automated smoke tests and health checks following each deployment.

Observability & Insights

Core benefit of the transformation was the transparency provided by observability. Prometheus and Grafana provide centralized logging and metrics using, along with OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing. Engineers had real-time insights into both the legacy and Kubernetes environments during migration and afterwards.

At each stage, Maven Solutions provided only the staff needed to compliment the client's team.

04. The Results

Value Delivered

Migration Completed, Capabilities gained

The legacy systems migration completed without unplanned downtime.
The client finally obtained the capability to deploy critical services without impacting users.

Deployemts & Uptime improvements

Deployment cycles that previously took several days were reduced to less than a day.
Uptime improved from 99% to consistently above 99.9%.

Reduced Costs, Improved visibility

Observability and monitoring tools empowered the teams to analyze system performance, to detect and resolve issues before they became customer-facing.
Operational costs decreased as repetitive manual work was eliminated and infrastructure was standardized as code.

CTO

Financial Services Company

I am happy that our legacy modernization project was as much about people as technology. Gradual onboarding to new workflows, incremental rollouts, and a strong rollback plan gave us the confidence we need to achieve zero downtime. Maven Solutions made it possible for us to fully modernize critical systems without disrupting business operations.