Legacy applications are the bane of many engineers’ existence. As if updating their code wasn’t bad enough, deploying legacy applications is fraught with so many broken and manual processes that hardly anyone believes it ever worked.

Some will advocate to throw all the legacy code away, and start anew with greenfield microservices. That could work, with a sufficiently powerful time machine. Others will encourage you to shove legacy applications in a container and hope that fixes things. Spoiler alert: it actually makes things worse.

There is a better way, and in this talk I’ll walk you through a three-step process that you can do it.

• Build automation; how to gather build artifacts from a variety of sources, even old VB6 build servers sitting in a closet
• Deployment automation; carefully deploying these artifacts to the dozens of odd places and servers they need go to, and making sure the configuration files are kept perfect and tidy
• Process automation; incorporating the manual and seemingly non-automatable tasks in to your automation pipeline