Modernizing Critical Infrastructure
Clearing three years of technical debt to future-proof core systems
Modernizing Critical Infrastructure
Clearing three years of technical debt to future-proof core systems
“It's great to see how stable Production is now, especially knowing how much effort went into testing, fixing, and stabilizing things in Pre-Prod. The attention to detail and teamwork throughout the process made a huge difference.”
- Simona P., Product Manager, Global Wholesale Distribution Giant
The Challenge
A global wholesale and food service distribution giant faced severe operational risks due to years of accumulated technical debt across its digital asset ecosystem. Critical workloads were running on deprecated runtimes, unsupported Kubernetes clusters, broken upgrade paths, and drifted Terraform configurations—creating ongoing stability and compliance risks.
The business-critical Laika platform was effectively dead with corrupted volumes, missing indices, and authentication failures. The environment included corrupted MongoDB replicas, unreliable cert-manager and DNS services, end-of-life Kafka and Elasticsearch versions, deprecated AMIs, 2,264 orphan volumes, and weak governance - creating a high-risk liability threatening data loss and downtime.
The Solution
Topcoder executed a comprehensive seven-month modernization program to resurrect the platform and eliminate years of technical debt.
The team performed multi-hop platform migrations with zero data loss. Kafka was upgraded from 2.4 to 3.4 with zero message loss, MongoDB upgraded preserving 1.8TB of critical data, and Prometheus upgraded to its 19th version. Elasticsearch, Redis, and cert-manager were modernized with security hardening and high-availability configurations. The Laika platform was completely resurrected through volume restoration, login system recovery, index rebuilding, and user data decryption.
Infrastructure modernization included EKS cluster upgrades, BottleRocket OS implementation, and API authentication enhancements. The Terraform stack was refactored with modular design and automated validations. Image registry caching was implemented with private rebuilds and improved IAM governance.
Performance optimization delivered a 51% compute reduction through Graviton3 adoption, performance-based rightsizing, and automated cleanup of 2,264 orphan volumes. Comprehensive documentation ensured operational excellence and faster onboarding.
3
Years of Technical Debt Cleared
6+
Core Services Upgraded
7
Months
100%
Infrastructure Modernization
51%
Resource Optimization
The Impact
The transformation delivered a stable, secure, and cost-efficient platform ready for future growth:
Zero data loss across all migrations, with 1.8TB of MongoDB data and Kafka message states fully preserved
Platform resurrection with Laika restored from end-of-life to modern, functional state
Significant cost reduction through ~18% AWS bill reduction and 51% compute resource optimization
Eliminated operational risk by removing deprecated runtimes, broken charts, and 2,264 orphan volumes
Modern security posture with hardened OS, improved IAM governance, and automated certificate management
Future-ready infrastructure with improved reliability, faster incident resolution, and enterprise-grade automation
Achieve high-quality outcomes with
Topcoder.
Achieve high-quality outcomes with Topcoder.