Full rewrites are the most expensive way to modernise. A strangler approach that keeps the business running while the platform changes underneath it.
Rewrites promise a clean slate and deliver two systems to maintain instead of one. The alternative — incremental replacement behind a stable interface — is slower to announce and far faster to benefit from.
Put a routing layer in front of the legacy application, move one bounded capability at a time, and keep both paths observable. Every increment must ship to real users, or you are simply rewriting in slower motion.
Data is the hard part. Decide early whether the new service owns its data or reads a replica, and never allow two systems to write the same table without a defined source of truth.
Set a retirement criterion for the old system at the start. Modernisation programmes without one run indefinitely.
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