Case Study: John Hancock achieves SOA-to-microservices modernization and faster CI/CD delivery with VMware Tanzu

A look at John Hancock’s journey from SOA to microservices

John Hancock, as part of a broader digitization strategy, set out in 2018 to retire 84 legacy SOA services and modernize a monolithic underwriting stack into API-led, cloud-ready microservices. The challenge was not only technical re-architecture but shifting teams from large, slow releases to iterative, product-focused delivery.

Working with Pivotal Labs and running workloads on Pivotal Platform, the company completed a 12-week redesign, adopted cloud-native practices (pair programming, TDD, MVPs) and CI/CD with Spring Cloud, Concourse and Git. The result: successfully migrated services, faster automated delivery with auto-scaling and failover, upskilled teams, wider reuse of best practices across the organization, and a stronger foundation for future technologies like Kubernetes.

John Hancock

Sunil Saxena

Senior Director, Shared Services