Live modernisation
Move forward without breaking continuity.
Most modernisation projects fail because they treat the platform as a green-field rebuild. Calvrix treats modernisation as a sequence of safe, reversible, observable transitions: performed while the business stays online. .NET 4.8 → .NET 10, on-prem → Azure-native, monolith → service-bounded, without business discontinuity.
The migration, visualised
Legacy and modern, running side by side.
.NET Framework → modern .NET.
Project model, dependency model, hosting, packaging, deployment: all rebuilt without a stop-the-world cutover.
On-prem / hybrid → Azure-native.
Workloads moved one slice at a time, observability and rollback in place before each move.
Hand-rolled deploys → CI/CD.
From scripts and ssh to reviewed pipelines, environment parity, and provable deploy safety.
Tribal knowledge → written architecture.
Decisions documented in ADRs the next engineer can read, and the next CTO can audit.
The phased approach
Four phases. No stop-the-world.
Assess
Map the current system, risks, constraints, costs, and operational failure points.
Stabilise
Remove unsafe deployment, infrastructure, observability, and ownership gaps.
Modernise
Move the platform forward without forcing business discontinuity.
Operate
Keep the system improving after launch, migration, or recovery.
How engagement works
The smallest contract: the next twelve safe transitions and how we verify each one.
A modernisation engagement starts with an honest read of the inherited system: what is reversible, what is not, what the safe next step is, and what step after that. The smallest meaningful unit of work we accept is the next twelve safe, observable transitions and the verification plan that proves each one landed.
- The first two weeks. An assessment of the current platform: explicit catalogue of reversible and irreversible decisions, integration surface, business continuity constraints, and an ordered list of the safe next twelve transitions.
- The migration cadence. Feature flags, dual-running, shadow traffic, traffic-percentage ramps, comprehensive observability, and an explicit rollback per step. Any step that cannot be rolled back gets a written ADR documenting the reasoning before it ships.
- How it is priced. Senior retainer plus a scoped milestone payment per verified phase. We do not bill by the hour, and we do not invoice for transitions that did not actually land.
- What we will not do. Open-ended modernisation mandates with vague endpoints. Migrations that require a production freeze. Pretending an inherited project is healthier than it is.
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Frequently asked
What buyers ask about live modernisation.
A freeze would be simpler for us. Why insist on doing it live?
A migration performed while the business stays online. The opposite is a freeze-and-rebuild approach where the platform stops accepting features for months. Live modernisation respects the fact that the business does not stop generating revenue while you re-architect, and so the modernisation must be safe at every step.
We want to start small before committing to anything large. What is the smallest piece?
A reversible transition. The smallest meaningful contract is "the next twelve safe transitions and how we verify each one." We do not take open-ended modernisation mandates with vague endpoints.
We cannot have an outage during peak trading. How do you avoid breaking continuity?
Feature flags, dual-running, shadow traffic, traffic-percentage ramps, comprehensive observability, and an explicit rollback per step. Any step that cannot be rolled back gets a written ADR documenting the reasoning before it ships.
Another supplier started this and walked away. Will you touch it?
Yes: most of them, in fact. The first two weeks are an audit of what exists, what is reversible, what is not, and what the safe next step is. We will not pretend an inherited project is healthier than it is.
Our ledger is the one thing we cannot get wrong. How do you approach the data layer?
Append-only ledgers, idempotent writers, online schema migrations with read/write compatibility windows. Audit-grade correctness is non-negotiable: the regulator must be able to read the history.