Modernizing My Legacy App with DigitalOcean App Platform and Serverless Functions

Legacy apps are often seen as technical debt — difficult to update, expensive to maintain, and sometimes a blocker for innovation. But what if we could give them a second life? That’s exactly what I’m doing with my legacy app, leveraging DigitalOcean App Platform to modernize it incrementally while introducing serverless functionality. This is my journey so far, including some of the challenges I faced and how I worked around them.

Why DigitalOcean App Platform?

DigitalOcean App Platform is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that lets developers deploy and scale applications without worrying about the nitty-gritty of the underlying infrastructure. For someone like me, who already had the app hosted on DigitalOcean, the App Platform became the ideal solution. It enabled me to start modernizing my app while reducing the operational overhead tied to maintaining legacy infrastructure.

The First Step: Moving PostgreSQL to a Managed Service

The foundation of modernizing any legacy app is often its database. My app relied on a PostgreSQL database hosted on the same Droplet as the rest of the application. The first modernization step was moving this database to DigitalOcean’s Managed…