Platform & ArchitectureAllianz Partners · 2025–present

Re-architecting monoliths to carry 3x traffic

The case in 30 seconds

Problem: The platform behind a €1B portfolio had grown into a project-based monolith. Synchronous processing locked the database under load spikes, and the architecture could not carry projected volume growth.
What I did: Built the case for the CEO, CIO, and CTO. Aligned Sales on dedicating team capacity to repay the technical debt. Split the domain into real-time and asynchronous services, and designed and validated the target architecture. I am leading the phased migration into the group cloud.
Impact: Migration is underway against a validated 3x-capacity design. Applications are in Allianz Cloud (January milestone), repositories on group GitHub, traffic routed through the group API gateway.

How it happened

2025 — Where it started
The constraint was invisible until named. I built the burning-platform case: operational, security, and commercial risk on one page. Then I took it to the CEO, CIO, and CTO to secure the mandate.
Securing the capacity
Executive alignment came before architecture: mandate and team capacity secured first, against commercial pressure to keep shipping features. Executive sponsors carried the mandate; Sales protected delivery capacity for debt repayment.
The architecture decision
Split by latency requirement, then by domain. Coverage checks and valuation stay synchronous on a fast path. Document processing moves to an asynchronous heavy path behind a workflow orchestrator. Domain boundaries were defined before migration, so services move one by one. Group cloud, security engineering, and enterprise architects validated the design.
The migration
Milestones, not a big bang. Cloud infrastructure first, then repositories, then the API gateway — each step forcing a real decomposition rather than a lift-and-shift. Gateway onboarding was the forcing function. Routing traffic through it required splitting the applications along domain boundaries, making the decomposition real before the rebuild.
In progress
The target architecture separates a synchronous fast path from an asynchronous document-processing path, sized for 3x current traffic.
3x
traffic capacity in the validated target design
Synchronous fast path, asynchronous document path
€1B
portfolio the platform underpins
Architecture and AI/data strategy owned end to end

What I took from it

Re-architecture earns its cost when it removes a bottleneck someone can name. It only gets funded when the executive floor can name it too.