Morningstar's MCIA business unit needed to update their DealView application, which manages CRE and CMBS data, to a modern technology stack using their own Morningstar Design System (MDS). This urgent update was required in record time to secure funding for the next major version upgrade. Moreover, the application had to be migrated from an on-premise data center being decommissioned to AWS.
An initial audit revealed that much of the business logic was embedded within 3,500 SQL Stored Procedures and even authentication for their API's was routed through these procedures as well. Additionally, bespoke MSSQL configurations made migration to AWS RDS complicated. To compound matters, the client-requested architecture involved creating a replicated AWS RDS as an integration shim, which failed during testing due to dynamic row-level UUIDs used as primary keys that were updated upon every modification for audit purposes.
It was time to roll up my sleeves and collaborate with our multidisciplinary team to devise a thorough roadmap allowing us to tackle technical debt iteratively while making progress on less challenging UI / UX improvements.
Despite the complexities and obstacles, we managed not only to deliver an MVP of the next-generation DealView by their hard deadline but also proposed an approach for migrating specific features iteratively to v2. This allowed Morningstar's customers to revert to classic features and associated UI if needed.
Attributes
- Domain: Financial Services / S&P400
- Architecture, Migration & Re-platform
- Microsoft .Net / C#
- Microsoft SQL Servers / RDS
- DevOps / IaC / Terraform
- Design Systems / Vue.js