Enterprise transformation at scale: When you’re serving 35 million people, there’s no room for downtime—or outdated architectures.
The challenge: When scale meets legacy
Picture this: You’re responsible for delivering benefits services to 35 million people across some of the world’s largest enterprises—70% of the Fortune 100 and 50% of the Fortune 500. But your flagship product is running on a monolithic architecture, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain—and nearly impossible to upgrade efficiently.
This was the reality for Alight’s engineering organization. They faced a significant challenge upgrading the company’s flagship Alight Worklife, which necessitated a major technology transformation within the benefits services industry. Their experience demonstrates how strategic platform decisions can profoundly impact engineering productivity and business agility, even at an enterprise scale.
The transformation: Breaking free from the monolith
Alight’s transformation challenge was multifaceted. “We had adopted wholesale platforms in the past and found that they were both difficult to maintain as well as difficult to drive forward,” Chris Roberts, vice president of enterprise architecture and IT operations at Alight, explained during a recent SpringOne spotlight session.
The solution was a strategic migration to Spring and Spring Boot that would break down monolithic applications into manageable, scalable microservices. By 2022, Alight had largely completed this architectural transformation, fundamentally changing how it delivers services to millions of users worldwide.
But here’s where the story gets interesting—and where many organizations stumble.
The hidden challenge: Upgrade burden in a microservices world
While Spring Boot solved Alight’s compartmentalization challenges, it introduced a new problem that many platform engineering teams know all too well: the overhead of maintaining and upgrading distributed services. Even with better architecture, upgrade cycles were consuming significant engineering resources, time that could be spent delivering value to customers instead of managing infrastructure.
Enter Application Advisor.
The game changer: Up to 70% engineering time reduction
The numbers speak for themselves, but the impact runs deeper than metrics.
The company saw a 70% reduction in engineering time required for maintenance upgrades. That’s not a typo—it’s a transformation.
“With Application Advisor, we really were able to eliminate quite a lot of the application development time necessary to do that work,” Roberts shared. “It allowed us to move that time from working on upgrades to really working with new capabilities that we could adopt for our customers.”
But the benefits extended beyond time savings. With Tanzu support, Alight transformed its upgrade cycle from every six months to every one to two years—and only when it makes business sense.
Beyond the technology: Building confidence at scale
What impressed the SpringOne at VMware Explore audience most wasn’t just the technical achievements, but how VMware’s approach built organizational confidence. Through bi-weekly office hours, targeted workshops, and deep-dive problem analysis, the Tanzu team delivered both the product and the expertise required to succeed.
“It’s really increased the confidence of our engineers in the organization in using Spring for our delivery,” Roberts noted. When you’re operating at Alight’s scale, that confidence is mission-critical.
Looking forward: AI and the next chapter
The transformation story doesn’t end with operational efficiency. Roberts and his team are also exploring emerging capabilities, such as Spring AI and enhanced Spring Data integrations. With substantially more engineering time dedicated to innovation rather than maintenance, Alight can more swiftly adopt next-generation capabilities, further differentiating its offerings.
The strategic imperative
The Alight story demonstrates how platform choices directly impact business outcomes. When your engineering capacity shifts from maintenance to innovation, you can go beyond simply optimizing operations and begin to unlock competitive advantage.
For developers and platform engineers, it’s proof that the right tools and support can reduce the friction that often comes with microservices architectures. Spring Boot’s flexibility combined with Tanzu’s operational excellence creates an environment in which engineering teams can focus on what they do best: building exceptional software.
See it in action
Chris Roberts’ story comes to life in our upcoming spotlight video, where he shares the tactical details behind Alight’s transformation. From architectural decisions to quantified business impact, it’s a masterclass in enterprise platform evolution.
Ready to explore how Tanzu Platform with Spring can transform your engineering productivity? Discover what’s possible when platform engineering meets enterprise-grade support.
SpringSpotlight – Defining the Future of Java Apps
Want to learn more about achieving similar results in your organization? Explore Tanzu Spring solutions and see how enterprises like Alight are redefining what’s possible with modern application platforms.
