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Your Microservices Lost to COBOL. Let That Sink In
In 2023, a major US bank spent $2.1 billion and four years migrating off COBOL.
They switched back.
The system processing your paycheck right now was written before your parents met — and it is faster, cheaper, and more reliable than everything we threw at it with Docker, Kubernetes, and six layers of API gateways.
That should not be possible. But it is.
The Room That Broke My Confidence
I want to be honest here. I was on that team.
I was the one who walked into the boardroom and sold the migration. I used words like “cloud-native” and “developer velocity” and “horizontal scalability.” I had slides. I had diagrams. I had conviction.
I believed every single word of it.
Two years later, I was sitting in a post-mortem room watching someone pull up a benchmark comparing our new order processing service against the old COBOL batch job it replaced.
The COBOL job processed 2.4 million records in 11 minutes.
Our distributed system — with retries, message queues, health checks, service discovery, and a Helm chart nobody fully understood — took 47 minutes. And crashed once under load.
