Cloud
What a real cloud migration actually looks like
A behind-the-scenes look at scoping, running, and delivering a cloud migration for a mid-sized company.
Cloud migrations are sold as "lift and shift." In reality, they are "lift, refactor, break, fix, and maybe shift."
I recently led a migration for a mid-sized fintech company. Here is what actually happened.
The Plan
We estimated 3 months. We planned to containerize everything, set up a Kubernetes cluster, and move the database to a managed service.
The Reality
The legacy code was coupled to the local filesystem. The database had stored procedures that were not supported by the managed service. And the "stateless" services were not actually stateless.
The Solution
We had to rewrite the core services. It took 6 months. But the result was a system that could actually scale.
Key Takeaways
- Audit everything. Do not trust the documentation.
- Start small. Move one service at a time.
- Automate early. If you do it twice, script it.