The scheduling of a cloud migration is a complex undertaking that should be thought and planned in advance. Typically, a migration architect is involved and makes the difficult technical decisions of what to migrate when, in concert with the organization management to take into account the business needs.

But it’s important for a migration to be successful that you limit your risk as much as possible during the migration, so that unforeseen problems don’t show up and cause your migration to go sideways, fail, or result in unexpected outages that negatively impact your business.

When scheduling the migration, there are a number of things you should keep in mind to increase the likelihood of a successful migration and reduce the risk of the migration itself. Here are five key methods to reducing the risk of your cloud migration, and hence increase your overall chance for success.

Links and More Information

The following are links mentioned in this episode, and links to related information:

• Modern Digital Applications Website (https://mdacast.com)

• Lee Atchison Articles and Presentations (https://leeatchison.com)

• Architecting for Scale, published by O’Reilly Media (https://architectingforscale.com)

• Advising and Consulting Services by Lee Atchison (https://atchisontechnology.com)

• Course: Building a Cloud Roadmap, 2018-2019 (https://leeatchison.com/classes/building-a-cloud-roadmap/)

Key #1. Limit the complexity of migrating your data

The process of migrating your data from your on-premise datastores to the cloud is, itself, the hardest, most dangerous, and most time-consuming part of your migration. There are many ways to migrate your data…some of the methods are quite complex and some of them are very basic. Some of them result in no need for downtime, others require significant downtime in order to implement.

There is a tradeoff you need to make between the complexity of the migration process and the impact that complexity has on the migration, including the potential need for site downtime. While in some scenarios you must implement a complex data migration scheme to reduce or eliminate downtime and reduce risk along the way, in general I recommend choosing as simple of a data migration scheme as possible given your system constraints and business constraints. The more complex your data migration strategy, the riskier your migration.

By keeping the data migration process as simple as practical given your business constraints, you reduce the overall risk of failure in your migration.

Be aware, though, that you may require a certain level of migration complexity in order to maintain data redundancy and data availability during the migration itself. So the ultimate simplest migration process may not be available to you. Still, it’s important that you select the simplest migration process that achieves your business and technical migration goals.

Key #2. Reduce the duration of the in-progress migration as much as possible.

Put another way, do as much preparation work before you migrate as you can, and then once you start the migration, move as quickly as possible to completing the migration, postponing as much work as possible until after the migration is complete and validated. By doing as much preparation work before the migration as possible and pushing as much cleanup work to after the migration as possible, you reduce the amount of time and complexity of the migration itself. Given that your application is most at risk of a migration related failure during the migration process itself, reducing this in-migration time is critical to reducing your overall risk.

For example, it may be possible to accept a bit lower overall application performance in the short term—during the migration, in order to get to the end of your migration quicker. Then, after the migration is complete, you can do some performance...