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# Defense Customer Story — 75% less modernization time **Industry:** Defense **Cloud:** AWS **Outcome:** 75% less modernization time ## Summary An undocumented .NET Windows monolith behind US Department of Defense logistics, rebuilt as 64+ cloud-native microservices on Kubernetes in six months instead of twenty-four. ## The Challenge ManTech International supports mission-critical technology for the US Department of Defense. At the heart of one key programme sat a 25-year-old legacy .NET Windows application — a complex logistics system built, patched, and extended over more than two decades.It worked. But it could not scale the way cloud-native systems can, it was hard to update, and critically there was no documentation and limited institutional knowledge of how it had been built. Modernizing a 25-year-old monolith is hard enough with a full blueprint; without one, the challenge multiplies.A manual approach would have taken 24+ months. In a defense environment with strict security and compliance requirements, that timeline was itself the risk — every month in place added technical debt and exposure. The team needed to modernize fast, safely, and without rewriting from scratch. ## The Solution Analysis, decomposition, and deployment ran as one automated workflow, so the architecture CHAI recovered from the code determined where the service boundaries fell — and those boundaries became the microservices that shipped.CHAI DART performed deep analysis of the legacy Windows application, mapping its architecture, dependencies, and components even without existing documentation. It recovered what institutional knowledge had failed to capture and handed it back as options: DART identified the opportunities, while the design decisions stayed with ManTech's engineers.Between analysis and decomposition sat CHAI Recipes — composite blueprints, governed playbooks, and security guardrails drawn from a library of 720+ enterprise-approved patterns. Every extraction followed a pattern already proven elsewhere, not a plan drawn up per service. CHAI Flow then identified the right boundaries for breaking the monolith apart, extracting 64+ discrete microservices from a single tightly coupled application, and CHAI Universe deployed them as cloud-native services running on Kubernetes on AWS. ## The Outcome A modernization that would have taken 24+ months manually was delivered in six — a 75% reduction in time and 25,000+ engineering hours saved, with months of architecture workshops and manual code analysis compressed into a fraction of the time.The 25-year-old Windows monolith is now 64+ cloud-native microservices on Kubernetes — scalable, maintainable, and built to be extended rather than patched. Architecture documentation that never existed was recovered directly from the code.Every DoD security and compliance requirement was met throughout: speed did not come at the cost of rigour. The programme cleared a two-year modernization backlog in six months without a full rewrite, and without relaxing a single security or compliance requirement. ## Stack - AWS - Kubernetes - .NET Windows - CHAI DART - CHAI Recipes - CHAI Flow - CHAI Universe ## Contact Book a demo: /contact/ Email: hello@cloudhedge.io