Curious to hear from people who’ve operated at the application / enterprise architecture level on large-scale systems especially in government or healthcare environments.
Working around a Medicaid modernization effort right now, and the gap between “clean architecture theory” and what actually works in a regulated, multi-vendor environment is pretty obvious.
A few things I’m seeing / hearing:
Moving from legacy systems to microservices/event-driven isn’t just technical governance and ownership get messy fast
API-first sounds great, but data contracts + cross-agency dependencies slow everything down
Hybrid cloud (Azure + AWS) adds flexibility but also complexity around identity, observability, and cost control
Compliance (security, data, audits) tends to drive architecture decisions more than scalability in some cases
For those who’ve been in the seat:
What actually caused the biggest issues during modernization?
What patterns looked good on paper but didn’t hold up?
How did you handle integration across vendors / legacy systems / new platforms?
Not trying to sell anything just trying to get perspective from people who’ve actually been through it.