By the numbers
01 · The challenge
Squarespace gives millions of businesses an all-in-one platform for websites, storefronts, finance tools, and marketing analytics. To support that scale, it maintains a large portfolio of backend Java services built on Tyson, its internal Spring Boot framework that standardizes the patterns and safeguards for delivering services.
As Tyson evolved, upgrades became increasingly difficult. Each new version cascaded across more than 200 services, requiring repeated dependency updates, API refactoring, and Gradle configuration changes. As the organization grew, the effort and coordination needed to complete these upgrades grew with it, slowing adoption of new Java and Spring Boot capabilities and straining feature delivery. A modernization backlog, version drift across services, and limited leadership visibility compounded the problem.
02 · The solution
After adopting Moderne, Squarespace turned its Tyson and Spring Boot upgrades into a predictable, scalable workflow. The platform team translated Tyson’s historically manual, multi-step migration guides into composite, organization-wide recipes that bundled thousands of Moderne Spring Boot recipes with Tyson-specific rules, plus the Gradle and configuration updates that previously had to be applied service by service.
Moderne provided the environment to run these large, composite transformations across hundreds of repositories, centralizing the execution, testing, and validation work that had exceeded the limits of Squarespace’s internal tooling. Teams ran recipes when ready, reviewed clean automated diffs, and merged with confidence. Squarespace then extended the same approach to Java, Gradle, and JVM image improvements.
03 · The results
The impact was immediate and measurable. Moderne automated 50 to 60% of the required migration steps for major Tyson and Spring Boot upgrades, and 60 to 70% for minor version bumps. Across the Tyson migration alone, Squarespace saved roughly 1,106 developer hours, returning meaningful engineering capacity to product development.
With deterministic, organization-wide recipes in place, Squarespace reached a level of upgrade consistency and predictability it had not achieved before, now keeping the majority of services within Tyson’s three-version support window. Work that once took multiple years is tracking toward sub-year timelines, and Moderne’s DevCenter gave leadership the real-time visibility they had long requested.
- Completed the Spring Boot 2.x to 3.3 upgrade in under a year, compared to the four years the 1.x to 2.x transition required.
- Reached 2.8x the original adoption goal.
- Automated up to 70% of the migration steps for major Tyson upgrades.
- Now keeps the majority of services within Tyson’s three-version support window, a milestone never achieved before.
- Positioned for Java 17 and 21 upgrades with renewed confidence.
See deterministic, estate-wide code change on your own repositories.