https://www.sh-soft.de/categories/legacy-modernization/ Recent content in Legacy Modernization on Steffen Hoppe – Infrastructure Reality & Insight Hugo en Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/sales-system-overview/ Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/sales-system-overview/ 📦 The Sales System Project – Overview Link to heading This series dives into a complex, long-running engagement centered on a fragile in-house sales system. The customer hosted 1,000+ Windows systems across development, test, and production stages. What began as firefighting evolved into automation, observability, and ultimately organizational change. The Journey begins Link to heading About 14 years ago, I took over responsibility for a single, large, in-house-developed sales system. https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/automation-boundaries/ Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/automation-boundaries/ 🚧 Automation Boundaries Link to heading Summary: Automation helped us move faster, reduce errors, and scale operations. But it didn’t solve everything — especially when our systems had to interact with others. Where the Boundaries Appeared Link to heading Active Directory and DNS: We didn’t own it. Scripted group changes or DNS edits weren’t possible without external coordination. Firewall Rules and Load Balancers: Managed by a different team. Automation stopped at the request ticket. https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/constant-evolution/ Thu, 12 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/constant-evolution/ 🔄 The Key to Success is Constant Evolution Link to heading The fixes and insights from our firefighting phase weren’t the end — they were just the beginning. We quickly realized that stabilizing a system is one thing, but keeping it healthy, fast, and maintainable over the long term requires ongoing, strategic evolution. So we created a plan on what to enhance and just started working. And we are still at it. https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/first-firefights/ Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/first-firefights/ 🔥 First Firefights Link to heading In the early days, most of our effort went into understanding where things failed. The system would break under pressure, produce unclear error messages, or behave unreliably depending on deployment timing. We had no telemetry. No usable monitoring. Bug reports were anecdotal. This forced us into manual observation and creative debugging — and pushed us to establish a more structured approach to system setup and error diagnostics. https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/setup-problems/ Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/setup-problems/ 🏗️ Setup and Problems Link to heading Setup Link to heading Customer Landscape: Initially ~200 Windows servers, later scaled to over 1,000 across development, test, and production as new services were added and integrated into our automation Primarily Windows-based infrastructure: IIS, MSMQ, MSSQL, and some JBoss AD integrated authentication via NTLM and Kerberos, sometimes Basic Auth, host backend integration via IBM MQ Business-critical data processed via mainframe interfaces Different teams have control over: Active Directory: DNS / Users / Groups Firewall and Security Infrastructure Reverse Proxies Virtualization platform PKI Internal traffic often unencrypted due to lack of automated PKI or cert lifecycle Problems Link to heading Initial Challenges: