Monolith Down: Cleaning Up After the Great Identity Migration Disaster

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

Speaker

Sonya Natanzon

Engineering Leader and Independent Architect

Sonya is a seasoned engineering leader and software architect who works at the intersection of the social and technical dimensions of software engineering. Sonya explores and applies methodologies such as Domain-Driven Design, Team Topologies, and the Architecture Advice Process to evolve both systems and teams. She regularly shares her insights and outcomes at international software architecture conferences and industry meetups.

Read more

Date

Tuesday Nov 18 / 10:35AM PST ( 50 minutes )

Location

Seacliff ABC

Topics

Architecture Migration Deployment

Video

Video is not available

Slides

Slides are not available

Share

Share Share

From the same track

Session AI/ML

Modernizing Relevance at Scale: LinkedIn’s Migration Journey to Serve Billions of Users

Tuesday Nov 18 / 11:45AM PST

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.

Speaker image - Nishant Lakshmikanth

Nishant Lakshmikanth

Engineering Manager @LinkedIn, Leading Infrastructure for "People You May Know" and "People Follows", Previously @AWS and @Cisco

Session

Unconference: Navigating Major Architecture Migrations

Tuesday Nov 18 / 01:35PM PST

Session Databases

Stripe’s Docdb: How Zero-Downtime Data Movement Powers Trillion-Dollar Payment Processing

Tuesday Nov 18 / 02:45PM PST

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.

Speaker image - Jimmy Morzaria

Jimmy Morzaria

Staff Software Engineer @Stripe, Previously Software Engineer on Amazon QLDB and Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka

Session Architecture

Accelerating Netflix Data: A Cross-Team Journey from Offline to Online

Tuesday Nov 18 / 05:05PM PST

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.

Speaker image - Rajasekhar Ummadisetty

Rajasekhar Ummadisetty

Software Engineer @Netflix - Driving Scalable Data Abstractions, Leader in Distributed Systems and Data Management, Previously @Amazon and @Facebook

Speaker image - Ken Kurzweil

Ken Kurzweil

Software Engineer @Netflix - Leading a Data Movement Team Focused on Data Infrastructure Innovation, Previously @Amazon, @Shutterfly, and @Gannett Media

Session Migration

Migrating Uber Eats Feeds to Webview

Tuesday Nov 18 / 03:55PM PST

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.

Speaker image - Nick DiStefano

Nick DiStefano

Sr Staff Engineer @Uber, Previously iOS Lead @Tumblr