ManTech modernizes a 20-year-old Windows app in 2.5 months, not 24.

# Defense Customer Story — 900% faster modernization

**Industry:** Defense
**Cloud:** AWS
**Outcome:** 900% faster modernization

## Summary
An undocumented, mission-critical Windows logistics application built over 20 years ago, containerized onto Kubernetes in 2.5 months instead of 24-plus.

## The Challenge
ManTech is a federal systems integrator with $4B+ in revenue, building and running mission-critical technology for US defense and government agencies. One of those programmes rested on a highly complex Windows logistics application originally developed more than 20 years ago — two decades of patches, extensions, and workarounds layered onto a codebase nobody had built recently.It worked. What it could not do was scale, or absorb change at the rate the programme needed. And critically there was no surviving architecture documentation and limited institutional knowledge of how the system had been assembled. Modernizing a 20-year-old application is hard with a blueprint; without one, the first months usually go to rediscovering what you already own.The conventional path for a system this complex runs 24+ months. On a mission-critical logistics programme that timeline is itself the exposure — every month in place adds technical debt, and the system has to keep running the entire time. ManTech needed to modernize fast, without a rewrite, and without a break in mission continuity.

## The Solution
Planning, design, and implementation ran as one automated workflow on CHAI (then OmniDeq), CloudHedge's modernization platform — so the architecture the platform recovered from the code drove the target design, rather than workshop assumptions drawn up before anyone had read it.CHAI DART performed deep analysis of the legacy Windows application, mapping its architecture, dependencies, components, and runtime characteristics even without existing documentation. It recovered what institutional knowledge had failed to capture and handed it back as options: DART identified the opportunities, while the design decisions stayed with ManTech's engineers.Between analysis and build sat CHAI Recipes — composite blueprints, governed playbooks, and security guardrails drawn from a library of enterprise-approved patterns. Each step followed a pattern already proven elsewhere rather than a plan drafted from scratch. CHAI Flow then packaged the application with its runtime dependencies and generated the Kubernetes manifests, and CHAI Universe deployed and operated the result as a containerized architecture on Kubernetes, on AWS.The sequencing is what compressed the calendar. Planning to design to implementation ran in a matter of weeks, not as three phases each measured in months.

## The Outcome
Modernization completed in 2.5 months against the 24+ months typically seen for work of this complexity — 900% faster — and 25,000+ human hours saved. Months of architecture workshops and manual code archaeology collapsed into automated analysis.The 20-year-old Windows application now runs as a containerized architecture on Kubernetes — able to scale, able to be updated, and no longer dependent on knowledge that had left the building. Architecture documentation that never existed was recovered directly from the code and is now an artifact the programme owns.Mission continuity held throughout. Manual labour dropped and time-to-value shortened sharply: speed came from automation, not from cutting scope. A two-year modernization backlog cleared in ten weeks, without a full rewrite.Published as a case study on the AWS Modernizing with AWS blog.


## Stack
- AWS
- Kubernetes
- Containers
- .NET
- Windows Server
- CHAI DART
- CHAI Recipes
- CHAI Flow
- CHAI Universe



## Contact
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Email: hello@cloudhedge.io