What specific challenges was Alight facing with their legacy application architecture?

Alight struggled with a monolithic application that was difficult to maintain and upgrade. Previous attempts to upgrade the solution had been unsuccessful, and wholesale platform adoptions proved both difficult to maintain and advance. The architecture prevented them from quickly delivering new features to their 4,300 corporate clients.

How does Tanzu Support help beyond the core Spring framework?

Tanzu Support provides extended support cycles that lengthen the time between required upgrades, giving more time for feature development. It includes bi-weekly open office hours, workshops, and direct assistance with scaling serverless components and implementing tools like Application Advisor. This support gives developers confidence to tackle implementations they couldn't manage independently.

Modernizing HR Applications with VMware Tanzu Spring

Name: Modernizing HR Applications with VMware Tanzu Spring
Uploaded: 2026-04-23T15:48:30-04:00
Duration: 2 min 40 s
Description: TL;DR Alight serves 70% of Fortune 100 companies and 35 million users with HR technology but struggled with monolithic application architecture that slowed feature delivery and made upgrades difficult VMware Tanzu Spring Essentials and Application Advi...

VMware

04/23/2026

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Transcript

to 70% of the Fortune 100, 50% of the Fortune 500. We serve 35 million people. We provide that benefits advantage by providing our clients with healthy and financially secure workforce. The challenges we were facing, we had a monolithic application that was quite difficult to maintain. We had been running efforts to try and upgrade that solution for some time and were really struggling to get that done. We had adopted wholesale platforms in the past and found that they were both difficult to maintain as well as difficult to drive forward. When we looked at our solutions, we really looked at Spring, Spring Boot, and the capabilities to get to something that we could create a very compartmentalized and a very capable environment. For Spring Boot, while it was more compartmentalized and was easier to work with, it still took a considerable amount of time to do those upgrades. When we adopted Application Advisor and began to use that for our upgrades, we really were able to eliminate quite a lot of the application development time necessary to do that work. It allowed us to move that time from working on upgrades to really working with new capabilities that we could adopt for our customers. We've also adopted Tanzu Support, and with that Tanzu Support, it gives us that capability to lengthen the cycles between our upgrade times and give us more time to work on customer features. The Tanzu team has helped us with scaling our environment for serverless components. They've helped us with introduction to the Application Advisor and delivery. They're running bi-weekly sessions for our organization that are open office hours. We also have capabilities around workshops. It's given our developers more confidence with the product. It's also allowed us to do some things that we would have struggled to do on our own. At Alight, we plan on continuing to use Spring to build our most significant products. It's a great solution for us in back-end service development. New capabilities like Spring AI, Spring Data really give us lots of options in delivery of our solutions.

TL;DR

Alight serves 70% of Fortune 100 companies and 35 million users with HR technology but struggled with monolithic application architecture that slowed feature delivery and made upgrades difficult
VMware Tanzu Spring Essentials and Application Advisor reduced upgrade time significantly, shifting developer focus from maintenance to building new customer capabilities
Tanzu Support provides extended support cycles and bi-weekly office hours, enabling Alight to scale serverless components and plan future development with Spring AI and Spring Data

Summary

Alight, a human capital and technology services provider serving 70% of the Fortune 100 and 35 million end users, faced significant challenges with their monolithic HR application architecture that hindered feature delivery and maintenance. The company struggled with lengthy upgrade cycles and platform complexity that diverted development resources away from innovation. By adopting VMware Tanzu Spring Essentials, including Spring Boot and Application Advisor, Alight transformed their development approach to a compartmentalized microservices architecture. The Application Advisor tool dramatically reduced upgrade time, allowing developers to focus on customer-facing features rather than maintenance work. Combined with extended support cycles from Tanzu Support and bi-weekly office hours with the Tanzu team, Alight gained the confidence and capabilities to scale serverless components and accelerate delivery of new HR application features to their 4,300 corporate clients. The company plans to continue building their core products on Spring, leveraging emerging capabilities like Spring AI and Spring Data for future innovation.

Chapters

0:00 - Alight's Business and Challenges
0:45 - Adopting Spring Boot Architecture
1:10 - Application Advisor Impact
1:49 - Tanzu Support Benefits and Future Plans

Key Quotes

0:23 "The challenges we were facing, we had a monolithic application that was quite difficult to maintain."
1:17 "When we adopted Application Advisor and began to use that for our upgrades, we really were able to eliminate quite a lot of the application development time necessary to do that work."
2:17 "At Alight, we plan on continuing to use Spring to build our most significant products."

Categories:

» Cloud
» Cloud » Hybrid Cloud
» Cloud » Private Cloud
» Cloud » Public Cloud
» Data Management
» Data Management » Converged Infrastructure
» Data Management » DevOps
» Data Management » Virtualization
» Cybersecurity » Application Security
» Cybersecurity » Cloud Security
» Data Protection

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