MongoDB AMP: An AI-Driven Approach to Modernization
Why should a database company be your modernization partner? It’s a fair question.
From over a decade of experience with database migrations, we've learned that the database is often the single biggest blocker preventing digital transformation. It's where decades of business logic have been embedded, where critical dependencies multiply, and where the complexity that blocks innovation actually lives. But by working with MongoDB, customers have found that transforming their data layer removed the barriers that had stalled previous modernization attempts.
Now,
with today’s launch of the MongoDB Application Modernization Platform
(AMP), we're providing customers a proven approach to full-stack modernization. MongoDB AMP is an AI-powered solution that rapidly and safely transforms legacy applications into modern, scalable services. MongoDB AMP integrates agentic AI workflows into our modernization methodology, alongside reusable, battle-tested tooling, and the expertise we've developed through customer engagements over the past decade—a powerful combination of tools, technique, and talent. By combining AMP tooling with MongoDB’s proven, repeatable framework, customers have seen tasks like code transformation sped up by 10x or more—with overall modernization projects implemented 2–3 times faster on average.
Figure 1.
The MongoDB Application Modernization Platform.
The common challenges
Many of our customers are facing the same impossible choice: accept growing technical debt that slows every business initiative, or risk disruption with a full system rewrite. Their teams are stuck maintaining legacy code instead of building new capabilities.
These legacy systems have evolved into interconnected webs (“spaghetti messes”) where even simple changes require coordination across multiple systems and teams. Database changes require corresponding updates to middleware integrations, application business logic, and user interface components. Teams struggle to update systems because any change brings risks breaking something else they don't fully understand. Innovation initiatives often get blocked because new capabilities struggle to integrate within the constraints of legacy systems. Technical debt accumulates with every workaround, making each subsequent change more complex and risky than the last.
Before working with MongoDB,
Intellect Design's Wealth Management platform exemplified this challenge perfectly
. Key business logic was locked in hundreds of SQL stored procedures, leading to batch processing delays of up to eight hours and limiting scalability as transaction volumes grew. The platform’s rigid architecture hindered innovation and blocked integration with other systems, such as treasury and insurance platforms, preventing the delivery of unified financial services that their enterprise clients demanded.
In cases like this, the result is stagnation disguised as stability. Systems "work" but can't evolve. Applications can handle today's requirements, but can't adapt to tomorrow's opportunities. Legacy architectures have become the foundation on which everything else depends—and the constraint that prevents everything else from changing.
Battle-tested solutions
By working through challenges with customers, we've built a comprehensive methodology for modernization, backed by sophisticated tools that address the messy reality of legacy applications. Our approach empowers application teams with proven processes and purpose-built technology to systematically address key challenges.
Central to our methodology is a test-first philosophy that has proven essential for safe, reliable modernization. Before any transformation begins, we develop comprehensive test coverage for existing applications, creating a baseline that captures how legacy systems actually behave in production. This upfront investment in testing becomes the foundation for everything that follows, providing guardrails that ensure modernized code performs identically to the original while giving teams the confidence to make changes without fear of breaking critical business processes. Our test-driven approach ensures modernization is a methodical, validated process where every change is verified.
Before we make any code changes, we establish a complete picture of the legacy system. We've built sophisticated analysis tools that comprehensively map legacy application architectures. These tools uncover the complex interdependencies and embedded logic that make legacy applications far more intricate than they appear on the surface. This deep analysis isn't just about cataloging complexity; it's about understanding the true scope, informing execution of the transformation, and identifying potential risks before they derail projects.
Analysis is just the start. By working with customers, we've learned that successful modernization requires careful sequencing and planning. Our dependency analysis capabilities help teams understand not just what needs to be migrated, but the critical order of operations and what safeguards need to be in place at each step. It's critical to avoid the temptation to migrate everything at once.
MongoDB’s approach is designed to make complex modernizations successful by transforming applications incrementally with robust validation. Instead of crossing your fingers and hoping everything works after months of development, our methodology decomposes large modernization efforts into manageable components where every component is iteratively tested and verified. Issues are caught early when they're easy to fix, not after months of development when rollback becomes costly and complex. Each successful iteration reduces risk rather than accumulating it.
The agentic AI acceleration
MongoDB AMP represents over two years of dedicated effort to integrate AI-powered automation into our battle-tested processes, dramatically accelerating modernization while maintaining the reliability our customers depend on.
AI powerfully expands our validation processes by generating additional test cases to validate modernized applications against their legacy counterparts. This dramatically improves confidence in migration results while reducing the time teams spend manually creating test cases for the complex business logic they are trying to preserve.
Our existing analysis tools, which decompose embedded logic into smaller segments, now feed directly into AI systems that can automatically transform the code components they discover. What once required weeks of manual code conversion can now happen in hours, with testing frameworks providing the same rigorous validation we've always insisted on. For example,
Bendigo and Adelaide Bank reduced the development time to migrate a banking application by up to 90%
. The difference is speed and scale, without sacrificing quality or safety.
Figure 2.
The AMP process.
Years of customer engagement and refined processes provide the foundation and guardrails that make AI-powered modernization effective and safe. With MongoDB AMP, AI becomes a force multiplier that transforms our proven approach into something that can tackle modernization challenges at unprecedented speed and scale.
Migrating simple code is now 50 to 60 times quicker, and we can migrate small applications 20 times faster to MongoDB. Regression testing also went from three days to three hours with automated test generation.
Fabrice Bidard, Head of Technical Architecture,
Lombard Odier
Ready to begin your modernization journey?
Legacy application modernization doesn't have to be a leap of faith. With MongoDB as your partner, you gain access to proven methodologies, battle-tested tools, and the accelerated capabilities that agentic AI brings to our existing expertise.
Contact our team
to discuss your specific challenges and learn how our proven methodology can be applied to your environment.
September 16, 2025
