Modernization used to be something you avoided until you couldn’t anymore.
A big rewrite. A long migration plan. A risky cutover. Something you’d maybe do once every few years—if you had to.
That model doesn’t work anymore.
The ask has changed. It’s not just “move to the cloud.” It’s:
get your apps into a state where you can actually build with AI, ship faster, and stay current.
And most teams are sitting on years of accumulated tech debt blocking exactly that.
Modernization is now a loop, not a project
What’s different now is the tooling.
With agentic workflows, modernization stops being a one-time event and becomes a repeatable loop:
- Assess what you have
- Upgrade what’s blocking you
- Migrate what needs to move
- Validate and deploy
- Repeat
Same flow as before—but now AI agents handle a lot of the mechanical work: analysis, transformations, fixing builds, generating deployment assets.
Which means you’re no longer stuck waiting for “the big migration.”
You can just… start making progress.
That’s what this series is about
We just released GitHub Copilot Modernize 101 on the Microsoft Developer Channel—a 9-part series walking through this end-to-end on a real Java app.
Going from:
- “I don’t know what this codebase does”
- → “I have a plan”
- → “we’re actually modernizing and shipping changes”
using agentic tooling the way you’d use it in practice.
Episode breakdown
Each episode focuses on one part of the loop so you can either follow along end-to-end or jump to what you need:
- Episode 0 — Java Application Modernization – Series Introduction
- Episode 1 — Assess Java Applications for Cloud Migration and Modernization
- Episode 2 — Upgrade Java, Spring, and Jakarta EE with GitHub Copilot
- Episode 3 — Real Experience Migrating a Java 5 / Struts 1.3 Monolith
- Episode 4 — Modernize Databases for the Cloud
- Episode 5 — Customize Copilot Modernization Tasks
- Episode 6 — Containerize and Deploy Java Applications
- Episode 7 — Modernization at Scale with the CLI and CI/CD Pipelines
- Episode 8 — Putting It All Together: End-to-End Java Modernization on Azure
Why this matters (right now)
Everyone wants to build AI-powered applications.
But you can’t bolt AI onto a stack that’s:
- running unsupported runtimes
- full of outdated dependencies
- not cloud-ready
- and hard to even understand
Modernization is the prerequisite—not the afterthought. [
What’s changed is the cost of getting there.
Start where you are
You don’t need a greenfield project.
Pick something slightly outdated. Slightly messy. Something real.
That’s where this workflow actually shows up.
Watch the series
First two episodes are out today, and others will continue to be released the next few days!
Final thought
Modernization isn’t going away—it’s just changing shape.
The teams that win here aren’t the ones that do the biggest rewrites.
They’re the ones that build a repeatable system for staying modern.
That’s the shift this series is trying to show.
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