Activity Spotlight

KBX’s Journey from Monolith to Microservices

KBX Technology Solutions began as an internal IT capability, building and supporting software solutions for the GP Transportation organization. The team developed their own Transportation Management Solution that manages much of Koch Industries' freight today. Most of the legacy TMS architecture leverages classic .NET, Windows services, and MS SQL Server. This architecture and the code base has grown significantly over the past 20 years. In 2019, a decision was made to initiate bespoke development of new solutions and capabilities on cloud-native architecture in AWS. The modernization vision at that time was to take an opportunistic approach, updating parts of the application when necessary. The anticipated timeline was 5-8 years. However, an opportunity to launch a commercial, multi-tenant suite of transportation solutions was identified and approved as a venture. This required a significant shift in strategy to aggressively develop a new architecture standard and begin to decompose the monolithic architecture of the legacy TMS. We would like to share our story - decisions made, where we are, and what's next.