Migrations are risky and when they go wrong, they can cause all kinds of significant damage. However, if you do some groundwork before starting the mi

Migrations Done Well: Executing Migrations

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Style Pass

2022-05-14 04:30:05

Migrations are risky and when they go wrong, they can cause all kinds of significant damage. However, if you do some groundwork before starting the migration, you’ll reduce risk, gain confidence and understand the scope of the migration better. Here are a few things you should do:

Love this. One of my favorite migration practices is to hold a "pre-mortem". The basic play is: - Write up a migration plan - Gather the team running the migration, plus stakeholders - Brainstorm stuff that could go wrong - Identify and prioritize ways to mitigate risk

Data migrations bring additional complexities of their own and tend to require more thorough planning. Some additional complexities you might need to consider are:

You have a plan in place and are confident you have the edge cases covered. Can you start the migration? Almost certainly not yet! First, you’ll need to ensure you have monitoring in place so you can track the status of the migration and detect problems. You’ll also want to validate that the migration will work with shadowing, dry runs and other processes.

Monitoring the migration is the single most important action which can make a migration successful, and detect one going wrong. The lack of dedicated migration monitoring is the reason for most migrations causing outages, in my experience.