Modernise legacy without a rewrite.
Five-year-old codebases that the original team has left. Vendor lock-in you cannot afford to keep. EOL frameworks, ancient Node, PHP 7, Rails 4. We have un-stuck them all.
Why every legacy modernization project fails the same way.
Most legacy modernization projects fail for one reason: they were rewrites pretending to be modernizations. The team scoped 6 months, hit month 12, ran out of budget, and ended up with a half-finished new system and the original legacy system still in production. We have inherited the aftermath of these projects enough times to refuse to repeat them. Modernization is strangler-fig: keep the old system running, move work to the new system one route or one job at a time, retire the old surface piece by piece.
What changes when a Metafic pod is in your repo.
Strangler fig pattern, not big-bang rewrite
New code runs alongside old code. Traffic gets routed at the proxy or service layer. Old code retires only after new code has been live for a measurable period.
Observability first, code change second
Most legacy systems have no traces, no structured logs, and no dashboards. We add these before we change anything else. So when something breaks, we know.
Framework upgrades through interim versions
PHP 5.6 to 8.3, Rails 4 to 7, Node 12 to 22. We do these in measured jumps with feature flags between, not in a single weekend.
Dependency audits with kill-list
Every legacy stack carries dependencies the original team is no longer maintaining. We audit, kill, replace.
Test harness around code we cannot rewrite
For the code that has to stay, we add the tests that catch regressions. So future changes are safe.
Who is on the pod for this work.
Pods scale up from here for Enterprise engagements.
Has done legacy modernization specifically. Knows when to leave code alone and when to extract.
Comfortable reading unfamiliar 200K-line codebases written by people who left years ago.
Designs tests against the legacy behavior. Catches the regression Drift before it ships.
For the deployment-topology changes that strangler-fig requires.
The bugs that bite this stack.
Hidden cron jobs and background workers nobody knows about
The most common modernization surprise. We discover them with infrastructure inventory in week one.
Database schemas that drift between docs and reality
Migrations applied manually, columns added in prod, types that do not match what the code says. We reconcile.
Vendor dependencies on EOL software
A payment provider that requires PHP 7. A reporting tool that needs Rails 5. We negotiate the upgrade path before the code path.
Tribal knowledge encoded in if-statements
A 15-year-old conditional that captures a business rule nobody can explain. We document before changing.
Honest about scope.
We will not do a big-bang rewrite. If your modernization request reads like "we want to rebuild this entire system from scratch in the new framework", we will push back. That project fails 7 times in 10.
Common questions.
How long does a typical modernization take?
6 to 12 months for the first big strangler-fig wins. The full retirement of legacy can take 18-24 months but production benefit shows up much earlier.
Can we modernize without disrupting users?
Yes. Strangler-fig keeps the user-facing system live throughout. Users do not see a re-launch. They see incremental improvement.
Should we migrate to the cloud as part of this?
Often yes, but as a separate stage. Modernising the code and migrating the infrastructure at the same time doubles the risk of both.
What if our legacy is in a language we want to leave (PHP, Perl, COBOL)?
We can do incremental rewrite, language by route. PHP to Go is common. PHP to PHP-modern is faster and usually right. We will tell you honestly which.
Ready to scope it?
A 25-minute call. We will tell you what we would do, what we would not, and whether a pod is the right shape.
Or stay in the loop. One engineering teardown a week.