TCDRS
Optimizely 12 Upgrade Delivers Modern Foundation and Better Performance
Texas County & District Retirement System (TCDRS), is one of the largest retirement funds in Texas, providing retirement, disability, and survivor benefits to more than one million current and former state, district, and municipal employees.
- Services
- Optimizely Upgrade
- Technologies
- .NetCore
- Optimizely
- Azure DevOps
- Memurai
- RabbitMQ
- React
- K6 for Load Testing
- Figma
Oshyn upgrades Optimizely to deliver new features and better performance for TCDRS staff and members.
The Challenge
For the more than one million Texas public employees and retirees who depend on TCDRS to manage their retirement benefits, the quality of the digital experience matters. Whether a sheriff’s deputy is checking if he’s on track for retirement or a county clerk is updating beneficiary information, the platform has to perform.
But TCDRS was built on Optimizely 11 and the aging .NET Framework. With each passing development cycle, the gap between what the platform could do and what modern development practices demanded continued to widen.
Not upgrading would make TCDRS more vulnerable to security risks and leave it behind competitors by missing out on the latest features. Soon, the platform stagnation could prevent the ability to respond to evolving member needs.
To help them chart a path forward, TCDRS turned to Oshyn to upgrade them from Optimizely 11 to Optimizely 12.
The Solution
Oshyn was selected due to its deep Optimizely expertise and certified practitioners who had worked extensively with TCDRS on previous projects.
Oshyn mapped the best upgrade path, which included switching from Redis to Memurai for improved high-availability caching. They then migrated the entire platform from .NET Framework to ASP.NET Core to enable faster execution, active long-term support, and compatibility with the growing ecosystem of ASP.NET Core-native tooling and integrations.
Oshyn also implemented RabbitMQ for reliable message queuing and centralized database access via an API layer, reducing complexity and improving the platform's maintainability going forward.
The Outcome
TCDRS now runs on a modern technology stack with active support. Since the upgrade, Total Blocking Time dropped by 17% on the homepage and 14% on member landing pages, with load times improving by up to 10%. What’s more, these performance gains came without changes to the underlying front-end code, representing the direct benefit of the platform upgrade alone, with further improvements expected as Oshyn continues to help TCDRS optimize the site.
Running on ASP.NET Core, the platform can leverage new Optimizely features. These include an intuitive content editor, headless deployments, and smoother integrations with other Optimizely products as they become available. The platform is also ready to scale as membership grows.
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