CLOUDLESS LABS

Project 05. Agriculture technology

From legacy ASP.NET and stored procedures to Node.js on serverless

A legacy stack of ASP.NET, C# and slow SQL stored procedures, modernised into Node.js on serverless AWS: faster, cheaper to run, and something a modern team can work on.

What it changed

  • Legacy ASP.NET and C# applications rebuilt in Node.js on serverless infrastructure.
  • A large body of slow stored procedures refactored, and the business logic moved where it can be tested.
  • Faster systems that cost nothing when idle, and a codebase AI agents and new engineers can both work in.

The situation

Once the platform was on AWS, the next problem was what it was made of. The core systems were legacy ASP.NET and C#, built for the server they used to live on. Much of the business logic sat in SQL stored procedures: an enormous number of them, many very slow, hard to test, and understood by fewer people every year.

What I did

I modernised the stack piece by piece, moving away from ASP.NET and C# to Node.js on serverless infrastructure. Each piece was rebuilt, tested against the old behaviour, and switched over while the rest kept running.

The stored procedures got the most care. I refactored a very large number of them: rewriting the slow queries, removing logic that had been duplicated across procedures over the years, and moving business rules out of the database into application code, where they can be read, tested and changed safely. The database went back to doing what it's good at.

Why it matters to you

I was a .NET developer for a long time before I moved to open source and AWS, so I know these systems from the inside: why they were built that way, and where they hide their surprises. Legacy systems are where most of a company's real business rules live. Modernising them is less about the new technology than about not losing a single one of those rules on the way.

Related projects

  1. 02 Cutting an AWS bill from US$240k a year to under US$40k An Australian agriculture-technology company with a large IoT sensor network · Agriculture technology · In progress An agtech platform was paying about US$240,000 a year for AWS. The programme under way takes it under US$40,000: roughly US$200,000 a year back in the business, for the same workload.
  2. 03 Real-time ingestion for a national farm-sensor network An Australian agriculture-technology company with a large IoT sensor network · Agriculture technology Thousands of field devices reporting around the clock, processed as the data arrives instead of hours later, on infrastructure that scales with the network.
  3. 01 Off a fragile VPS and onto AWS, with almost no downtime An Australian agriculture-technology company with a large IoT sensor network · Agriculture technology A growing agtech platform ran on a single server that could neither scale nor be secured. I moved all of it to AWS, live, with almost no downtime, then rebuilt it to scale.
  4. 04 Deep neural networks that forecast the weather An Australian agriculture-technology company with a large IoT sensor network · Agriculture technology Machine-learning models and deep neural networks, trained on the company's own sensor data with GPUs on Amazon SageMaker, to predict the weather where its customers farm.

Got a project like these?

Tell us where the business needs to go. You'll talk to the engineer who will design and build it, not a salesperson, and get an honest answer on whether we're the right fit.

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