About

I’m Michael Paonam — I help companies modernize legacy Java systems without full rewrites.

9+ years of experience taking aging enterprise backends and making them production-ready for today’s requirements: Spring Boot migrations, event-driven architectures with Kafka, containerized deployments on Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines that actually work. I’ve done this at SAP for the last 9+ years — decomposing monoliths, replacing manual deployment scripts with GitHub Actions on Kyma, and cutting release cycles in half.

What I typically work on

Legacy → Spring Boot migrations — Refactoring aging Java services to modern Spring Boot with proper authentication, observability, and structured logging.
Monolith decomposition — Introducing Kafka for async communication, enabling independent deployments, reducing release coupling between teams.
CI/CD & deployment modernization — Replacing manual processes with containerized pipelines (Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions). Typical result: 60-70% reduction in deployment time.
Observability retrofits — Distributed tracing, structured logging, alerting that tells you what’s actually wrong. Making systems debuggable, not just running.

How I work

I take contract engagements — typically 4-12 weeks. I work best embedded with your team, operating on your codebase, shipping incremental improvements rather than producing architecture documents. I’m based in Bangalore (IST) and work comfortably with async-first teams across time zones.

Get in touch

If you have a Java backend that’s slowing your team down — deployment pain, reliability issues, or a monolith that’s become a bottleneck — I can help.