Containers solved a huge deployment headache—but they didn’t magically erase legacy thinking. If your “modernization” effort stopped at lifting-and-shifting monolithic apps into Kubernetes, you’ve simply boxed yesterday’s problems in today’s tech.

In this session we’ll unpack why true modernization demands more than orchestration stickers: it requires re-architecting for event-driven, serverless, and AI-augmented patterns that slash time-to-value and operating costs. Drawing on field experience across 50+ enterprise and startup transformations—spanning 8,000+ AWS Lambda functions, real-time data pipelines, and GenAI copilots—we’ll explore:

• The Illusion of Progress: Hidden technical debt and cost traps that containers often preserve.
• Transformation Levers: Domain-driven decomposition, serverless services, and managed data layers that free teams from infrastructure toil.
• GenAI as a Catalyst: Where large-language-model capabilities amplify modernization ROI—and where they don’t.
• Change Management Playbook: Culture, skill-matrix, and governance shifts that let teams iterate safely at cloud speed.
• Success Metrics & Case Studies: Concrete KPIs (release frequency ↑ 5×, infra spend ↓ 60%) from healthcare, QSR, and fintech modernizations.