Abstract
One does not simply migrate a monolith. Imagine a team working on a monolith-to-microservices migration of a healthcare portal. A foundational first step - migrating to a commercial identity provider - takes 9 months, only to bring the entire portal crashing down on release day. Users locked out. Trust shattered. The lead gets fired. You step into the fray. Now what?
In this talk, I’ll share what it’s like to inherit an architectural initiative that already exploded - and how to turn it around without becoming the next cautionary tale. We’ll cover rollout strategies, risk mitigation tactics, and how to deliver product value while pulling the system out of the fire, restoring user trust, and rebuilding the team’s reputation. Think of it as disaster recovery - but with more debugging and fewer hazmat suits.
Key Takeaways:
- Practical strategies for stabilizing and recovering from a failed architecture rollout
- Techniques to deliver new product value while untangling legacy systems
- Tactics for regaining trust after a high-profile outage
- Lessons on phased migration planning that balance ambition with safety
Topics
QCon San Francisco 2025 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
From the same track
Tuesday 18 November
10:35 Seacliff ABC Session Architecture Monolith Down: Cleaning Up After the Great Identity Migration Disaster Sonya Natanzon Engineering Leader and Independent Architect One does not simply migrate a monolith. Imagine a team working on a monolith-to-microservices migration of a healthcare portal. A foundational first step - migrating to a commercial identity provider - takes 9 months, only to bring the entire portal crashing down on release day. 11:45 Ballroom A Session AI/ML Modernizing Relevance at Scale: LinkedIn’s Migration Journey to Serve Billions of Users Nishant Lakshmikanth Engineering Manager @LinkedIn, Leading Infrastructure for "People You May Know" and "People Follows", Previously @AWS and @Cisco How do you deliver relevant and personalized recommendations to nearly a billion professionals—instantly, reliably, and at scale? At LinkedIn, the answer has been a multi-year journey of architectural reinvention. 13:35 Seacliff D Unconference Unconference: Navigating Major Architecture Migrations 14:45 Ballroom A Session Databases Stripe’s Docdb: How Zero-Downtime Data Movement Powers Trillion-Dollar Payment Processing Jimmy Morzaria Staff Software Engineer @Stripe, Previously Software Engineer on Amazon QLDB and Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka Stripe processes over $1 trillion in payments annually with industry-leading reliability, powered by its custom-built document database, DocDB, built on top of open source MongoDB. Stripe's DocDB serves over five million queries per second from Stripe’s product applications. 15:55 Seacliff ABC Session Migration Migrating Uber Eats Feeds to Webview Nick DiStefano Sr Staff Engineer @Uber, Previously iOS Lead @Tumblr Uber Eats has many surfaces developed using native-first design. Historically these were built on the Android and iOS stacks. To accelerate development and enable rapid iteration and experimentation, while preserving the native-first design, a webview-powered stack was developed. 17:05 Ballroom A Session Architecture Accelerating Netflix Data: A Cross-Team Journey from Offline to Online Rajasekhar Ummadisetty, Ken Kurzweil At Netflix, certain use cases demand the rapid transfer of massive datasets—such as 50 TB—from offline to online systems. Doing this efficiently, without disrupting applications interacting with our online systems, presents a significant challenge.