.NET applications have powered enterprise workloads for decades. But as these applications — and the underlying monolithic databases — age, businesses often face ballooning maintenance costs, limited scalability, and a lack of robust multi-region support in the cloud.
We’re excited to announce that Cockroach Labs is building on our successful partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Together, we’re helping customers to modernize their mission-critical .NET applications, simplifying the process with the transformative capabilities of generative AI-powered Amazon Q Developer. Combined with Cockroach Labs’ tools, our latest collaboration accelerates database modernization to CockroachDB, a resilient, scalable distributed SQL database optimized for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and hybrid AWS Outposts deployments.
Modernize Now
There is constant pressure for enterprises to optimize cost and infrastructure. Meanwhile, aging systems lock businesses into expensive hardware, labor-intensive updates, and limited scalability.
By modernizing .NET applications — and the traditional databases that they rely on — companies can access the elasticity, global availability, and cost efficiency of AWS. As we’ve seen from our customers, modernizing is about more than keeping pace with technology trends; it’s about reducing risk and preparing applications for whatever the future holds.
“Enterprises are rapidly modernizing to cloud environments, moving away from legacy monolithic .NET architectures to embrace distributed architectures that offer horizontal scalability and resiliency,” says Allen Terleto, VP Global Partners and Ecosystem, at Cockroach Labs. “While microservices unlock these benefits at the application layer, they can’t be fully realized if the data layer remains monolithic. To truly leverage the cloud, organizations must adopt a distributed database architecture — where CockroachDB enables seamless scalability, resiliency, and cost control.”
Enter Amazon Q Developer
Amazon Q Developer brings generative AI to the application transformation process. By automating much of the heavy lifting, Amazon Q Developer helps teams save time, reduce migration errors, and focus on delivering value faster.
“Amazon Q Developer’s AI-driven transformation capabilities significantly enhance the speed and simplicity of modernizing .NET applications, especially when paired with CockroachDB’s distributed architecture,” says David Joy, Senior Sales Engineer at Cockroach Labs. Some of the most impactful ways it achieves this includes:
Automated Code Refactoring: Amazon Q Developer automates repetitive and error-prone tasks, such as identifying deprecated APIs, updating them to modern standards, and generating optimized code snippets. This reduces manual effort and minimizes bugs during modernization.
Transition to Cross-platform .NET: It facilitates upgrading .NET Framework applications to cross-platform .NET, enabling them to run on AWS’s cost-effective Linux-based environments while integrating seamlessly with cloud-native services.
Microservices Decomposition: Amazon Q Developer analyzes monolithic .NET applications to suggest logical service boundaries and refactoring strategies. Combined with CockroachDB’s ability to manage distributed transactions and provide a consistent data view across nodes, this accelerates the shift to a microservices architecture.
Database Interaction Optimization: It offers recommendations for adapting database queries and schemas to leverage CockroachDB’s distributed features —like multi-region deployments and automatic sharding — enhancing performance and scalability.
Error Detection and Fixes: Amazon Q Developer’s agents proactively identify and resolve build errors or compatibility issues, ensuring a smoother modernization process and reducing downtime.
“When used with CockroachDB, these AI-driven features streamline the transition from rigid, Windows-centric applications to flexible, cloud-native systems, leveraging CockroachDB’s strengths to support distributed workloads effectively,” adds Joy.
Testing: The Hidden Costs
According to Terleto, an often overlooked challenge of application modernizations comes in the testing phase, which can introduce significant costs.
“What does it take to test applications in the monolithic, legacy .NET world, where the codebase can span millions of lines?” he notes. “Modern architectures are typically built on microservices, each with a limited scope and a dedicated database. In contrast, monolithic .NET applications often suffer from ‘code sprawl,’ with SQL interactions scattered across numerous embedded modules and segments, making testing and modernization more complex.”
“These interactions aren’t always obvious,” Terleto explains. “So, when modernizing a monolithic application — such as migrating from Microsoft SQL Server to CockroachDB — enterprises must first identify every data access connection. Then, they need to account for each instance and ensure thorough testing to guarantee a seamless transition.”
The costs, complexities, and risk associated with addressing code sprawl can be a serious barrier to starting data modernization projects. However, with Amazon Q Developer this tedious and time-consuming operation is no longer a manual effort.
“From assessments to transformation and automating the scanning and testing of millions of lines of code, Amazon Q Developer’s AI capabilities can accelerate the entire process,” says Terleto. “It’s a game changer for time-to-value, avoiding the analysis paralysis that often stalls modernization efforts. With powerful GenAI tools like Amazon Q Developer, we’re poised to see a resurgence in modernization initiatives, much like the early wave of cloud adoption.”
CockroachDB: A Distributed Foundation for the Cloud
Moving your .NET applications to AWS is one piece of the puzzle; ensuring you have the right database to handle global scaling and high availability is the other. CockroachDB fits naturally into this cloud-native picture with:
Multi-Region Resilience: True active-active deployments that automatically replicate data across AWS regions.
Seamless Horizontal Scalability: Grow your database footprint easily as application demand increases.
Legacy RDBMS Compatibility: Minimize friction with built-in support for many standard SQL features such as stored procedures, triggers, cursors, XA transactions, read-committed, and much more.
With CockroachDB, developers enjoy a distributed system that delivers the performance of a global architecture, without the operational headaches and scalability constraints that come with traditional databases.
AWS and CockroachDB: Constructive Collaboration
By combining AI-powered transformation from Amazon Q Developer with CockroachDB’s resilient distributed design, enterprises can systematically address the challenges inherent in legacy Windows-based environments — whether it’s scaling to billions of orders or ensuring 24/7 uptime across continents. Together, Cockroach Labs and AWS provide a comprehensive strategy and toolset that help organizations future-proof their applications while controlling costs.
The move to modern, cloud-native systems shouldn’t be daunting. AWS and Cockroach Labs are working in tandem so organizations can accelerate migrations, reduce operational overhead, and unlock the full power of distributed architecture.
Next Steps
Try CockroachDB on AWS: Explore how easy it is to deploy CockroachDB on Amazon EC2 or EKS, or even in hybrid AWS Outposts deployments. Get started here or find us on AWS marketplace.
Experience Amazon Q Developer: Take advantage of AI-driven code transformation capabilities to see how quickly you can modernize your .NET applications. Learn more here.
