Choice Hotels automates code modernization and security at scale
By the numbers
01 · The challenge
Choice Hotels, one of the largest hotel chains in the world with more than 7,000 properties, runs a modern, cloud-based architecture supported by over 500 engineers. With hundreds of microservices, each with its own dependencies and versions, it became increasingly difficult to keep libraries current, ensure security compliance, and manage vulnerabilities across the board.
Manual remediation was time-consuming and reactive, often pulling developers into unfamiliar codebases and away from business-critical work. The impact became clear during Log4j remediation, which required an all-hands engineering effort over six weeks. Simpson estimates Moderne could have performed the refactoring work in an afternoon. The team needed a more automated, repeatable way to address vulnerabilities and apply modernization patterns without slowing feature delivery.
02 · The solution
To improve modernization velocity and reduce security remediation overhead, Choice Hotels integrated Moderne into their software delivery pipeline. The platform let teams define reusable, automated refactoring recipes that run across repositories, accelerating routine upgrades, enforcing code quality standards, and applying fixes with precision.
Rather than treating it as a one-time, high-risk initiative, the engineering team used Moderne and multi-step refactoring recipes to migrate from Java 8 to Java 21 in one leap, running migrations across hundreds of repositories with consistency and accuracy. The team has also automated Spring Boot upgrades and vulnerability remediation, turning what had once been an all-hands scramble, like patching Log4j, into a controlled, predictable process.
03 · The results
With Moderne, the team completed a full, multi-step migration from Java 8 to 21 across their entire application portfolio, over 500 services, in the same time it had previously taken to upgrade just 10% of that footprint by one version step.
The platform’s success prompted broader internal adoption. After seeing early results, Choice Hotels continued to expand Moderne usage across teams, increasing recipe coverage and scaling secure development practices.
- Reduced technical debt across teams with no disruption to business delivery.
- Improved developer confidence through formatting-aware transformations that preserved each team’s code style.
- Accelerated adoption of Java 17+ features, opening the door to future performance and security improvements.
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