Company
Driven by innovation, this Fortune 100 luxury brand manufacturer is at the forefront of transforming transportation experiences with cutting-edge technology, precision engineering, and sustainable solutions. With a dominant global presence, the company is committed to advancing its operations and crafting exceptional products that elevate every customer journey.
Background
The company used a custom, on-premises .NET application
to track thousands of parts on production floors at manufacturing sites across Europe, the U.S., Africa, and Asia. The simple barcode reader played a crucial role in ensuring parts were delivered to the correct assembly areas.
With a new focus on remote maintenance, decentralized systems, and ensuring high availability in the cloud and at the edge, the company needed to modernize this widely used, essential application to meet evolving operational needs.
Challenge
The manufacturer faced significant challenges with its vital custom-built app, which had become increasingly complex, ingesting 60 million data points daily. As its architecture became more entangled with dependencies and technical debt, the team struggled to leverage it effectively to support the company’s global operations. Built on an on-premises, monolithic design, the system lacked scalability and flexibility, making it difficult to modify, extend, or adapt to evolving business needs.
Defining moment
Tight coupling within the source code made testing and troubleshooting increasingly difficult, preventing the development team from effectively maintaining and enhancing the app. Key challenges included:
- Lack of redundancy, making the system vulnerable to failure
- Limited extensibility, hindering the addition of new features or scaling to support growing operations
- Insufficient control for the maintenance team, leading to inefficiencies and delays in addressing operational demands
Decision: Completely refactor. Move to Microsoft Azure.
To keep pace with production and maintain its focus on innovation, the company decided to completely refactor the application and migrate it to Microsoft Azure. This move set the stage for redundancy and global coverage for multiple factories around the globe from the cloud.
How vFunction powered the shift to the cloud in under three months
vFunction played a critical role in modernizing and migrating the application to Microsoft Azure in under three months. Through its architectural observability platform, vFunction provided the necessary insights to refactor the application from a complex, .NET monolith into a microservices-based architecture.
vFunction’s analysis identified entangled classes and guided the team in refactoring the code to ensure clear domain separations. This streamlined the process of transforming the application into microservices, implemented in .NET 8. The new architecture, along with its supporting ecosystem—utilizing Redis for caching, Kubernetes for orchestration, and KEDA for event-driven autoscaling—was optimized for efficient scaling on Azure, meeting high-availability requirements while also enabling future flexibility.
The result was a leaner, more efficient, and more reliable application with improved readability, a clear class hierarchy, and better long-term sustainability—all completed in under
three months.
What’s next
Following a successful rollout at the first site, the next step is to expand the modernized application to other locations.
Data from the updated, Azure-based system will seamlessly integrate into the company’s broader data network via Kafka, ensuring smooth data flow across applications.
Building on the success of this initiative, the company plans to continuously monitor the newly refactored application to prevent future complexity and modernize other applications as part of a broader effort to streamline and improve processes. By leveraging vFunction and Microsoft Azure for application modernization and migration, the company is setting the stage for greater agility, faster innovation, and integrated, future-ready systems across the Fortune 100 leader.
