Legacy monolithic applications are slowing your business down. Cambay re-architects ageing software into cloud-native microservices — deployed on Azure Kubernetes Service — enabling continuous delivery, auto-scaling and the development velocity your competitors already have.
Application modernisation is the process of transforming legacy, monolithic applications into cloud-native, containerised microservices — deployed on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The result is software that scales automatically, deploys safely in minutes and can be changed by individual teams without touching the whole system.
Cambay's cloud architects assess your existing application landscape, design the target architecture and execute modernisation programmes that deliver measurable outcomes — faster time-to-market, lower infrastructure cost, higher reliability and a development team that can finally move fast.
App modernisation on Azure solves the engineering, operational and commercial problems that legacy architectures create — enabling velocity, resilience and growth.
Every deployment is an all-hands event. Testing takes weeks, deployments happen at midnight, rollbacks are manual and something always breaks — your competitors are shipping daily while you ship quarterly.
Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions deliver fully automated build, test and deployment pipelines with blue-green switching and canary releases — reducing deployment time from weeks to minutes with zero downtime.
A marketing campaign, a seasonal peak or a viral moment sends traffic surging — and your application falls over. You're either over-provisioned (expensive) or under-provisioned (unavailable).
AKS horizontal pod autoscaler scales individual microservices up and down in seconds based on real CPU, memory and custom metrics — handling any traffic spike automatically without manual intervention.
A decade of patch-on-patch development has created a tightly coupled codebase where nobody understands the whole system. New features take 3× longer than they should and regressions are constant.
Decomposing the monolith into bounded-context microservices gives each team full ownership of their service — independent deployments, independent scaling and freedom to choose the right technology.
Large VMs running legacy applications sit at 5–15% average CPU utilisation — you're paying for capacity you never use, with no ability to scale down overnight or at weekends.
Containerising applications on AKS dramatically increases server density. Serverless functions on Azure Functions scale to zero when idle — Cambay typically delivers 40–50% infrastructure cost reduction through containerisation alone.
Your application has dozens of direct integrations to third-party systems — each a custom, undocumented API call. When one system changes, everything downstream breaks and nobody knows why.
Azure API Management centralises all internal and external API interactions behind a managed gateway — with versioning, rate limiting, authentication, developer portal and analytics for every API in your estate.
When production goes down, the team spends hours searching logs across multiple servers, correlating timestamps manually — with no distributed tracing, no structured logging and no alerting until users complain.
Application Insights, Azure Monitor and distributed tracing give complete end-to-end visibility across every service, request and dependency — with smart detection alerts that identify issues before users do.
From containerisation and AKS to DevOps, serverless and API management — Cambay delivers the full cloud-native application stack on Azure.
Orchestrate containerised microservices at enterprise scale — with automatic scaling, rolling updates, self-healing and the full power of the Kubernetes ecosystem, managed by Azure.
Azure manages the Kubernetes control plane, patches and upgrades — you focus on deploying applications, not managing infrastructure.
Scale individual services up or down based on CPU, memory or custom metrics — in seconds, without any manual intervention or downtime.
Deploy new versions with zero downtime using rolling update strategies. One-command rollback to the previous version if issues are detected.
Kubernetes automatically restarts failed containers, reschedules pods from failed nodes and replaces unresponsive instances — continuous availability.
Assign managed identities to pods for secure, password-free access to Key Vault, Storage, Databases and other Azure services.
Manage multiple AKS clusters across regions with Azure Fleet Manager — for disaster recovery, geo-distribution and blue-green environments.
Automate every stage of your software delivery pipeline — from code commit to production deployment — with Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions, delivering multiple safe releases per day.
Enterprise Git hosting with branch protection, pull request workflows, code owners and policy gates — ensuring code quality before merge.
Azure Pipelines triggers on every commit — building, testing and creating container images with full test suite execution and quality gates.
Unit, integration, security scanning (SAST/DAST) and container vulnerability scanning gates prevent broken or insecure code from reaching production.
Route a percentage of traffic to new versions before full cutover — validating performance and error rates before committing to the full rollout.
Agile project management — backlogs, sprints, work items and burndown charts — natively integrated with pipelines and repos for end-to-end traceability.
Dependency scanning, container image signing, SBOM generation and policy-as-code ensure every artefact deployed to production is trusted and verified.
Host web applications, REST APIs and mobile backends with enterprise SLAs — with built-in auto-scaling, SSL, custom domains, deployment slots and deep Application Insights integration.
Support for .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, PHP and Ruby — run any web framework on a fully managed PaaS with automatic OS patching.
Staging slots for zero-downtime deployments — swap staging to production instantly, with auto-swap configuration for CI/CD pipelines.
Scale out App Service instances based on CPU, memory, HTTP queue depth or custom metrics — handling any traffic pattern cost-effectively.
Inject App Service into your Azure VNet to access databases and services privately, with Private Endpoints eliminating public internet exposure.
Built-in authentication with Microsoft Entra ID, Google, Facebook and Apple — securing APIs without writing authentication code.
Dedicated, fully isolated hosting for high-scale, high-security workloads — running in your own VNet with no shared infrastructure.
Event-driven serverless compute that scales to zero when idle and handles millions of invocations when needed — ideal for integrations, automation, APIs and microservice backends.
Pay only for execution time on consumption plan. Premium plan for VNet integration, pre-warmed instances and longer execution limits.
Trigger functions on schedule, HTTP requests, Service Bus messages, Blob Storage events, Event Hub streams or Cosmos DB change feed.
Orchestrate long-running, stateful workflows in serverless code — fan-out/fan-in patterns, human approval flows and chained activities.
Write results directly to Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Service Bus, Storage or Event Hub without infrastructure plumbing — just configure the binding.
.NET Isolated worker process provides full control of middleware, DI container and runtime version — independent of the host version.
Package functions as container images deployed to Azure Container Apps or AKS — combining serverless execution with container portability.
Centralise, secure, analyse and monetise every API across your organisation — with a developer portal, rate limiting, OAuth2 authentication and end-to-end observability for every API interaction.
Single entry point for all backend APIs — routing, load balancing, caching and transformation handled centrally without touching backend code.
Auto-generated, customisable developer portal where internal and external consumers discover, test and subscribe to APIs with self-service onboarding.
Enforce authentication policies — validate JWTs, call authorisation servers and restrict API access by subscription, IP or certificate.
Protect backends from abuse with per-subscription rate limits and usage quotas — configurable without code changes to the backend service.
Track call volumes, latency, error rates and consumer usage per API, operation and subscription — with Power BI integration for reporting.
Transform requests and responses with inbound/outbound policies — add headers, rewrite URLs, mock responses and call external services inline.
Full-stack observability for cloud-native applications — distributed tracing, structured logging, performance monitoring and AI-powered anomaly detection across every service in your architecture.
SDK-based APM collecting requests, dependencies, exceptions, page views and custom events — with live metrics streaming for real-time incident response.
End-to-end transaction tracing across microservices, message queues and external dependencies — pinpoint latency and failures across the full call chain.
Centralised log aggregation from AKS, App Service, Functions and infrastructure — with KQL queries, saved searches and alert rules.
AI-powered anomaly detection identifies failure rate spikes, performance degradation and dependency issues — alerting before users notice.
Operational dashboards combining metrics from multiple services — customised per team, with pinned charts and service health summaries.
Define error budgets, burn rate alerts and SLO dashboards that give engineering teams clear signal on reliability — aligned to business commitments.
Cambay uses a proven strangler fig pattern — progressively extracting services from the monolith without a big-bang rewrite. Each phase delivers value while reducing legacy dependency.
Architecture review, codebase analysis, dependency mapping and cloud readiness scoring. Output: modernisation roadmap with prioritised service decomposition plan.
Establish AKS cluster, CI/CD pipelines, container registry, monitoring and security baseline — the platform that every microservice will deploy onto.
Extract the highest-value bounded context from the monolith as the first independent microservice — proving the pattern and delivering immediate deployment velocity.
Sprint-by-sprint extraction of additional services — each one making the monolith smaller and the microservice architecture broader — with the legacy app running in parallel throughout.
Once all traffic is routed through the new cloud-native architecture and the legacy monolith is confirmed idle — decommission it and eliminate the infrastructure cost.
We'd been talking about modernising our core platform for 5 years but were paralysed by the risk. Cambay's strangler fig approach meant we extracted services one at a time — our first deployment to production from the new pipeline happened in week 6. We now deploy 15 times a day. The transformation has been extraordinary.CTO · US SaaS Platform, 200,000 Users
Have a question about modernising your applications? Our cloud architects are ready to help.
Book an Architecture ReviewRarely. The strangler fig pattern — gradually extracting services from the monolith while keeping it running — is the safest and most common modernisation approach. You get the benefits of cloud-native incrementally, without the risk and cost of a big-bang rewrite. Cambay's assessment identifies which parts of your system to modernise first for maximum impact with minimum risk.
AKS is Microsoft's managed Kubernetes service — the industry-standard platform for orchestrating containerised applications. Azure manages the Kubernetes control plane (updates, patching, availability) for free, leaving you to manage only your application workloads. It provides auto-scaling, self-healing, rolling deployments and a rich ecosystem of tools — making it the default choice for cloud-native application platforms on Azure.
Virtual machines virtualise hardware — each VM runs a complete operating system, consuming gigabytes of memory even before your application starts. Containers virtualise the operating system — sharing the host OS kernel, starting in milliseconds and consuming megabytes. This means you can run 10–20× more application instances on the same hardware, dramatically improving density and reducing cost.
An application assessment and first microservice extraction typically takes 8–12 weeks. Full platform modernisation programmes for complex monoliths are multi-quarter engagements — typically 6–18 months — delivered in sprints with working software at the end of every two weeks. Cambay scopes each programme based on the complexity, coupling and business priority of your application landscape.
Cambay is technology-agnostic on CI/CD tooling — we work with Azure DevOps Pipelines, GitHub Actions and GitLab CI depending on your existing tooling and team preference. The principles are the same regardless of tooling: automated builds, test gates, container image scanning and progressive deployment strategies. We help you adopt GitOps practices using Flux or ArgoCD for Kubernetes deployments.
The strangler fig pattern (coined by Martin Fowler) involves gradually replacing components of a legacy monolith by routing specific functionality to new microservices — one piece at a time — until the monolith can be decommissioned. It's named after the strangler fig tree that grows around an existing tree until the original is no longer needed. It's the safest way to modernise without a high-risk, high-cost full rewrite.
Database decomposition is often the hardest part of modernisation. Cambay uses the Database-per-Service pattern — each microservice owns its own data store. We use the Saga pattern for distributed transactions and event sourcing for audit trails. Data migration is done incrementally with dual-write patterns ensuring zero data loss and zero downtime during transition.
Cambay offers managed support packages for modernised Azure environments — covering AKS cluster management, pipeline maintenance, dependency updates, security patching, cost optimisation and access to our architects for new feature work. We also offer DevOps-as-a-Service engagements where we embed Cambay engineers into your team on a retainer basis.
Book a free Architecture Review with a Cambay cloud architect. We'll assess your current application landscape, identify modernisation priorities and produce a risk-free phased roadmap — at no cost and no obligation.
✓ No obligation · ✓ Microsoft Solutions Partner · ✓ No Big-Bang Rewrite
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