Modernizing at Scale: API Evolution, Platform Transformation, and AI-Driven Acceleration

About the Session

Modernizing legacy platforms that power billions of transactions per day is not for the faint of heart—especially when APIs are at the center of mission-critical workflows. In this session, I’ll share practical lessons from leading platform transformation efforts at scale, including evolving a legacy system that supports over 2 billion live records and handles 500+ billion daily API calls. I’ll walk through how we seamlessly migrated a massive monolithic listing platform—with zero downtime—while incrementally modernizing its data layer from tightly coupled Oracle databases to a scalable, NoSQL-based architecture. One of the core enablers of this journey was transforming our 20-year-old SOAP-based API ecosystem into a modern, flexible GraphQL layer. This shift not only improved developer velocity and agility but also enhanced system resilience and observability. I’ll also explore how AI tools are now playing a pivotal role in our modernization strategy. Internally, we’re using AI for dependency discovery, service decomposition, and identifying modernization bottlenecks. Externally, we’re leveraging AI to improve customer-facing API experiences—including a “Magical Listing Experience” that lets sellers create full product listings from just an image, powered by computer vision and language models. Attendees will gain concrete, real-world insights into API-first modernization, including governance strategies, migration without disruption, AI-augmented platform engineering, and enabling new customer experiences with intelligent APIs.

Speaker

Sureshkumar Karuppuchamy

Ebay, Technical Leader