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Facing rapidly evolving markets and increasing demands for agility, performance, and resilience, many Swiss organizations today confront aging monolithic systems. These heavy, rigid codebases slow down development cycles and prevent fully leveraging the cloud’s potential. Redesigning a monolith into a modular cloud-native architecture therefore becomes a strategic imperative—not only to modernize IT infrastructure but also to accelerate time-to-market, control maintenance costs, and enhance the reliability of digital services.
When and Why Should You Refactor a Monolith?
Identifying the right time to initiate a redesign requires an accurate diagnosis of current limitations. Understanding the underlying business stakes helps prioritize the transition to a flexible, scalable architecture.
Technical Symptoms Revealing an Aging Monolith
Systematic regressions after each deployment and prolonged downtime are clear indicators that a monolith has reached its limits. When the slightest change to a feature triggers unexpected side effects, team agility suffers.
Testing and release processes become longer as dense code makes understanding internal dependencies difficult. Every release turns into a high-risk endeavor, often requiring freezes and rollbacks.
In a recent case, a Swiss retail company experienced a 30 % drop in IT productivity with each release cycle due to the lack of unit tests and the monolith’s complexity. A complete software refactor resolved the issue by enabling the implementation of modern, appropriate testing processes.
Business Impact and the Cost of Technical Debt
Beyond productivity impacts, technical debt manifests in exponential maintenance costs. Frequent fixes consume a disproportionate share of the IT budget, diverting resources from innovation projects.
This technical inertia can delay the launch of new features essential for responding to market changes. Over time, the company’s competitiveness weakens against more agile rivals.
For example, a Swiss industrial SME facing recurring budget overruns decided to isolate the most unstable components of its monolith to limit emergency interventions and contain support costs.
Post-Refactoring Objective
The aim of refactoring a monolithic software architecture into a cloud-native one is to decouple key functionalities into autonomous services, each able to evolve independently. This modularity ensures greater flexibility when adding new capabilities.
A containerized infrastructure orchestrated by Kubernetes, for instance, can automatically adjust resources based on load, ensuring controlled horizontal scalability and high availability.
Ultimately, the organization can focus its efforts on optimizing business value rather than resolving technical conflicts or structural bottlenecks.
Key Steps for a Successful Cloud-Native Refactor
A gradual, structured approach limits risks and facilitates the adoption of new paradigms. Each phase should rely on a clear plan, validated with both business and technical stakeholders.
Technical Audit and Functional Mapping of the Monolithic Software
The first step is to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the monolith: identify functional modules, critical dependencies, and fragile areas. This mapping is essential for developing a coherent decomposition plan.
The analysis also covers existing test coverage, code quality, and deployment processes. The goal is to accurately measure the level of technical debt and estimate the refactoring effort required via refactoring.
In a project for a Swiss financial institution, this audit phase revealed that nearly 40 % of the code lines were unused, paving the way for drastic simplification. This underscores how crucial this analysis phase is to ensure tailored refactoring efforts that fit the organization’s IT context.
Identifying Decomposable Modules as Services
Based on the mapping, teams pinpoint core features to isolate: authentication, catalog management, transaction processing, etc. Each module is treated as a potential microservice.
Priority criteria combining business impact and technical criticality are applied. Modules likely to deliver quick wins are addressed first, ensuring tangible results in early iterations.
For example, a Swiss insurance provider began by extracting its premium calculation engine, reducing testing times by 60 % and freeing up time for other initiatives.
Incremental Migration Plan
Migration is conducted in stages to maintain service continuity and mitigate risks. Each developed microservice is integrated progressively, with end-to-end tests validating interactions.
A parallel deployment scheme provides a transparent cutover, allowing the old monolith to act as a fallback until sufficient confidence is achieved.
This iterative approach was adopted by a Swiss logistics services company, which gradually decoupled its shipment tracking module without impacting daily operations.
Edana: strategic digital partner in Switzerland
We support mid-sized and large enterprises in their digital transformation
Concrete Case Study
A field case illustrates how a progressive decomposition can transform an aging system into an agile ecosystem. The measurable benefits encourage continued pursuit of a cloud-native strategy.
Initial Context
An industrial provider had a 3-tier monolithic application that struggled to handle load spikes and generated frequent incidents during releases. Production lead times often exceeded a week.
The IT teams had to intervene manually for every configuration change, lengthening downtime and multiplying support tickets.
These constraints undermined customer satisfaction and delayed the rollout of new modules essential for meeting regulatory requirements.
Transformation and Progressive Decomposition
The first iteration extracted the user management engine into a separate, containerized, and orchestrated service. A second phase isolated the reporting module by adopting a dedicated database.
Each service was equipped with CI/CD pipelines and automated tests, ensuring functional consistency with every update. Deployment times dropped from several hours to a few minutes.
Traffic switching to the new microservices occurred gradually, ensuring service continuity and enabling immediate rollback in case of anomalies.
Results Achieved
After three months, production cycles were reduced threefold, while production incidents dropped by 70 %. Teams could focus on functional optimization rather than troubleshooting technical issues.
Scalability improved thanks to container elasticity: during peak periods, the user service automatically adjusts, preventing saturation.
This project also paved the way for future integration of advanced AI and data analytics modules without disrupting the existing infrastructure.
Advantages of a Cloud-Native Architecture Post-Refactoring
Adopting a cloud-native architecture unlocks adaptability and growth previously out of reach. Modularity and automation become genuine competitive levers.
On-Demand Scalability
Containers and Kubernetes orchestration enable instant scaling of critical services. Automatic resource allocation reduces operational costs while ensuring performance.
During traffic spikes, only the affected modules are replicated, avoiding resource overconsumption across the entire system.
A Swiss retailer observed a 40 % reduction in cloud infrastructure costs by dynamically adjusting its clusters during promotional campaigns.
Continuous Deployment and Reliability
CI/CD pipelines combined with automated tests offer unmatched traceability and deployment speed. Teams can deliver multiple times a day while controlling regression risk.
Incidents are detected upstream thanks to non-regression tests and proactive monitoring, ensuring a reliable user experience.
In the Swiss financial services sector, this approach halved the mean time to resolution for critical incidents.
Preparing for Future Challenges
Service independence facilitates the adoption of multi-cloud solutions or edge computing, depending on business needs and local constraints.
This flexibility paves the way for embedding AI, data lakes, or managed services without risking technological lock-in.
A Swiss telecommunications player is now preparing to deploy 5G and IoT functions on its fragmented architecture, leveraging the cloud-native approach to orchestrate millions of connections.
Transform Your Monolith into a Strategic Asset
Redesigning a monolith into a cloud-native architecture is neither a mere technical project nor a high-risk operation when carried out progressively and methodically. It relies on precise diagnostics, business prioritization, and an incremental migration plan combining automated testing with deployment automation.
The benefits are tangible: accelerated deployments, reduced incidents, controlled scalability, and the opening of new services. Each organization can thus turn its IT into a genuine competitive advantage.
Whatever stage you’re at in your modernization journey, our experts are ready to help you develop a tailored roadmap, ensuring a secure transition aligned with your business goals.
