Your application works. Your users depend on it. But maintaining legacy infrastructure or even running applications on Kubernetes without fully leveraging its capabilities can be a constant source of toil. The sunk cost fallacy often keeps people from investing time and effort into improving architectures. But how do you modernize without disrupting existing users?

In this session, we'll walk through a real-world modernization journey: from statically-allocated VM workers to a fully Kubernetes-native architecture without downtime. You'll see how we used queue-based routing as a migration lever, letting us move users one at a time from legacy infrastructure to auto-scaling container pods. You'll learn why we stopped building images inside our workers and instead delegated to platform-native CI/CD pipelines. That one decision eliminated the need for privileged containers entirely.

Walk away with a template for modernizing a service into a cloud-native architecture, without rewriting from scratch and asking your users to take a leap of faith.