Working with legacy, business‑critical portals

Netrisk operates well‑known portals such as bankkalkulator.hu and telenet.hu, built over many years on a legacy PHP stack with MySQL, Redis, memcached and MongoDB components. The portals were business‑critical, but the underlying codebase had grown complex, onboarding new developers was slow, and releasing changes carried significant risk.

CoreConsult was asked to take over maintenance and continuous development of these alternative business line portals, without disrupting ongoing business or compromising availability.

The challenges we met

• Large, heterogeneous legacy PHP codebase with Zend Framework and custom CMS/framework elements.
• Business‑critical traffic and revenue – outages and regressions were not acceptable.
• Slow, fragile release process with limited automation and visibility.
• Difficult onboarding for new developers and distributed teams.

What we delivered

• Stabilised and evolved the existing systems instead of a risky “big‑bang” rewrite, improving structure where it created clear value.
• Introduced a modern GitLab‑based workflow (similar to Git Flow), enabling an expanded team of around ten developers – both CoreConsult engineers and Netrisk’s internal team – to work safely in parallel.
• Rolled out reproducible Vagrant‑based development environments so every developer could spin up an identical stack quickly, reducing “works on my machine” issues and speeding up onboarding.
• Built CI/CD pipelines with quality gates: static analysis (PHP_CodeSniffer, Phan), automatic style fixes (PHP Code Beautifier and Fixer) and PHPUnit‑based unit and integration tests on every change.
• Implemented automatic database backup and schema migration processes, turning risky manual operations into routine, low‑risk tasks.
• Integrated Sentry on both frontend and backend for real‑time error tracking, and Statuscake for external availability monitoring.

Impact for Netrisk

• Shorter, safer release cycles with significantly fewer regressions.
• Easier scaling of the development team thanks to standardised environments and workflows.
• Reduced operational risk through automated database management and observability.
• Freedom to innovate on the user experience (for example on bankkalkulator.hu) while relying on a stabilised legacy base.