Event: Brain Station 23 × AWS webinar
Date: 6 August 2025 (GMT+6)
Speakers: Md. Mizanur Rahman (CTO & Director, Brain Station 23) and Bubai Bal (Solution Architect, AWS)

“Transformation isn’t just about technology, it’s about empowering people to achieve more, faster.” — Md. Mizanur Rahman
“Modernizing on AWS enables greater scalability, cost efficiency, reliability, faster innovation, better integration, and operational efficiency.” — Bubai BalWhy this conversation mattered
Many enterprises still run mission-critical workloads on legacy platforms that weren’t designed for today’s security demands, user expectations, or scale. Big-bang rewrites are risky and expensive—but standing still is riskier. The session explored pragmatic ways to modernize: reinforcing what works, isolating what doesn’t, and introducing cloud-native capabilities that unlock agility now, not years from now.
Reality check: Your legacy systems won’t evolve on their own—but your competitors will.
Key takeaways
- Reinforce, then replace. Use modern, secure frameworks around high-value legacy capabilities; phase out brittle components with proven migration patterns.
- Eliminate bottlenecks without a full rewrite. Containerize hotspots, add caching and queues, and introduce event-driven/serverless services for quick wins.
- Build for growth. Establish cloud guardrails—identity, networking, observability—so every improvement scales safely and compliantly.
Session highlights
1) Real-world modernization stories
We walked through projects where COBOL and Fortran systems were incrementally migrated to Java and .NET. Rather than switching everything at once, teams applied the strangler-fig pattern and anti-corruption layers to keep business running while new services came online. API gateways and message brokers allowed the old and new worlds to coexist with clear contracts and testable interfaces.
2) AI-assisted acceleration with Amazon Kiro
AI can shorten discovery and delivery cycles. With Amazon Kiro, teams can:
- Analyze legacy codebases to map dependencies and hotspots.
- Generate scaffolding, tests, and refactoring suggestions to reduce boilerplate.
- Speed up conversion and hardening so engineers focus on design and quality.
3) Security & compliance by design
Security isn’t an afterthought; it’s the runway. The webinar covered:
- Identity isolation (least privilege, SSO, short-lived credentials)
- Secrets management & encryption everywhere
- Threat detection & guardrails (policy-as-code, automated checks)
- Mapping controls to compliance requirements to shorten audits and reduce operational risk
4) Architectures that work now
- Containers & serverless for elasticity and cost efficiency
- Event-driven integration to decouple modules and scale independently
- Managed databases & data services to improve reliability without adding ops burden
- Observability first: central logging, metrics, and tracing with service-level objectives to make each release safer than the last
A simple, low-risk roadmap
- Assess & prioritize
Inventory domains, SLAs, dependencies, and pain points. Pick a single high-value slice—an API, report, or batch job—to pilot.- Establish guardrails
Set up landing zones, identity boundaries, networking, cost controls, and observability.- Carve out and containerize
Wrap the targeted capability with APIs; containerize where appropriate; introduce queues for long-running jobs.- Introduce cloud-native services
Move specific functions to managed databases, serverless jobs, or event buses to remove bottlenecks.- Harden security & validate
Bake in encryption, secrets rotation, and policy-as-code; test with contract suites and performance baselines.- Measure & scale
Track latency, error rates, cost per transaction, and developer throughput. Expand the approach domain by domain.
Q&A snapshots
Do we have to rewrite everything?
No. Start with the highest-impact slice and iterate. Parallel runs plus contract testing keep risk low.How do we justify ROI?
Measure concrete outcomes: response-time reduction, error-rate drops, security posture improvements, and developer-hour savings from automation/AI.What about data migration?
Use phased strategies—dual-write/dual-read, change-data-capture, or blue-green cutovers—with strong rollback plans.How do we keep teams productive during the transition?
Automate CI/CD, testing, and security checks. Use AI to accelerate code analysis and refactoring so engineers focus on domain logic.
Here is the presentation Deck:






























