Divide your Jira or Confluence migration into phases
When it comes to migrating your data or apps to cloud, one of the strategies is phased migration. This method involves gradually transitioning your data or apps in steps rather than all at once. It provides some flexibility, but it's important to recognize that phased migration can be a complex process requiring careful planning and execution.
This guide will offer a deep dive into phased migration, exploring common migration scenarios, risks, and the technical considerations you'll need to manage before deciding if it's the right migration strategy for you.
Why phased migration?
Opting for phased migration is not just a preferred strategy - it’s often a necessity for organizations seeking a smooth and successful transition. By breaking the migration process into smaller, more manageable stages, you can reduce the risks inherent in large-scale migrations. Here you can review some of the potential advantages of phased migration:
Flexibility: Phased migration allows you to make real-time adjustments based on the feedback from each phase, ensuring a more adaptive and responsive approach.
Proactive risk management: By addressing issues in each phase, you prevent potential problems from escalating across your entire system.
Easier troubleshooting: With fewer components involved at any given time, identifying and resolving issues becomes faster and more precise, leading to a smoother migration experience.
Given the complexity of large-scale migrations a phased migration might be your best option. However, it is important to recognize that this strategy can be a challenging process, requiring detail planning to avoid delays, cost overruns, or technical issues.
Phased migration scenarios
Before initiating a phased migration, it's crucial to identify the migration scenario that best fits your needs. These scenarios often depend on your current infrastructure and future cloud goals. Here are some common examples:
Scenario | Data Center to Cloud | Cloud to Cloud |
|---|---|---|
Dividing data into phases If you prefer to retain control over various segments of your data, dividing your migration into phases is an option. | One Data Center instance migrated to one cloud site in multiple phases.
| One cloud site migrated to one cloud site in multiple phases.
|
Consolidating multiple instances into one This involves consolidating multiple environments whether self-managed or cloud, into a single cloud site. | Multiple Data Center instances migrated to one cloud site.
| Multiple cloud sites migrated to one cloud site.
|
Dividing a single instance into multiple sites This scenario involves migrating your data from a single environment into multiple sites. | One Data Center instance migrated to multiple cloud sites.
| One cloud site migrated to multiple cloud sites.
|
Preparing for a phased migration
Preparation is crucial to the success of any phased migration. The following steps are essential for ensuring a smooth transition:
Migration scope: It is important to first capture and define the migration scope to understand how to move forward with the migration. Identify any linked Projects and/or Spaces to migrate them together.
Make sure that your organization is prepared: If organizations are going to be merged, it is important to verify the domains on the cloud organization before conducting the test migration.
Review Marketplace app migration paths: Evaluate existing documentation and contact the vendors to learn best migration practices. This ensures you're aware of all dependencies, requirements, and potential obstacles.
Lock the user migration strategy: Finalize the plan for migrating users, including data access, authentication, and permissions.
Define the migration strategy: Identify the sequence of instances or data to be moved. Define clear milestones for each phase. Keep the phases as minimal as possible to reduce the complexity of phase migration technical considerations.
Test and validate: Before fully migrating, conduct pilot migration for each phase to validate that the process works as expected.
Develop a rollback plan: In case of failures or unexpected issues, a rollback plan ensures that your business can continue running while resolving issues.
Ensure adequate training: Your teams need to be fully trained on any new cloud tools or platforms.
Risks and technical considerations
Phased migration offers flexibility but comes with inherent risks and technical challenges. Understanding and mitigating these risks will help ensure the success of your migration:
Configuration drift: The biggest risk with the phased migration method is “configuration drift.” This is caused when users make changes to the source or destination site between migration phases, creating “drift” that can cause future migrations to fail. The post-migration clean-up can be tedious for admins.
Some projects were created in Cloud vs. Data Center: It might affect future migration. It could introduce some complications depending on what you do in the new project related to custom fields, permission schemes, duplicated project keys, and so on.
Manual work after migration: Not everything is migrated with the Cloud Migration Assistants (Jira, Confluence). Manually migrating specific data and fixing post-migration issues requires particular expertise. This might be complicated when different teams manage phases.
Downtime: When migrating with a phased approach, longer downtime is expected. Certain Jira features may temporarily lose or reduce functionality during phased transitions.
Security concerns: Increased vulnerability to data breaches during the transition.
User resistance and training: Users may resist change or struggle to adapt to new features and workflows.
Complex testing: Increased complexity in coordinating phased migration efforts across teams and departments. Testing requires multiple runs and constantly adjusting with the content already migrated to the cloud.
Detailed considerations
Here are some specific Atlassian technical considerations related to the functionality that should be addressed during a phased migration toc loud:
Component | Impact, challenges, and recommendations |
|---|---|
Advanced Roadmaps | Advanced Roadmaps requires all plans to be migrated together. This means all projects associated with the plans have to be migrated together. The challenge shows up when the projects selected can’t be migrated together and have to be phased and separated. |
Jira macro repair | Jira macro repair runs with the concept of one source app link to one destination link. In phased migrations or federated migrations or in general any situation where all projects are not brought over to one destination cloud, macro repair will be inaccurate. |
User migration | Aggregating users from multiple sources can be challenging with phased migrations. Migration of partial users is not possible accurately. Also, if users are managed in a non-IDP, non-Crowd deployment, the permissions might not be aligned. Sometimes the challenge is also there when users have different email addresses across sources and destinations. |
App links | App links would have to be re-created on the cloud. Newly created app links create new IDs that are different from the IDs in source servers. Sometimes, you security teams can interfere with giving access to cloud URLs to connect to their servers. |
Dashboard migration | Migration of dashboards requires you to choose whether to migrate all dashboards from Data Center or only those linked to the selected projects. Additionally, after migration, some dashboard gadgets may not work because certain gadgets in Data Center are either third-party or not currently supported in cloud. |
Link fixing | Link fixing is available in cloud only and doesn’t work well in partial migrations. In phased migrations, link fixes on cloud are supported but for the intermediate state, Data Center to Cloud links are not updated as no solution exists for the same. It’s also challenging to differentiate between migrated/non-migrated projects as we update all base URLs. |
Boards and filters | Boards and filters don’t always get migrated within the scope of projects being migrated. |
Duplicate entities | A proper cleanup of duplicates done post-migration or proper effort put in pre-migration to prevent duplicates, both are extremely time-consuming efforts. The best case scenario is to migrate all data in one go, reduce the amount of time to create config drift, and reduce the amount of phases which increase the possibility of duplicates. And where possible federate your instances rather than consolidate. |
Marketplace app dependencies
Dependencies on Marketplace apps is one of the key factors and issues in phased migrations. They might decide how you have to combine projects together in a single phase or exclude some projects from the migration entirely.
Connecting data in the intermediate state
If you need to allow communication between your migrated projects or spaces and the ones that stayed in Data Center (for example, to open issue links), you need to set up application links between your instances.
You can set up two types of app links:
Tunneled app links: These app links use application tunnels to connect to your server instances without having to open your network for incoming connections (recommended).
Direct app links: These are regular app links that require that you open your network for incoming connections from cloud.
Learn how to configure tunneled app links
Learn how to configure direct app links
Summary
Phased migration offers certain advantages, particularly for larger organizations that need to minimize risks and disruptions during the transition. By breaking the process into smaller, controlled stages, businesses can ensure better resource allocation and test each phase thoroughly before moving forward, reducing the likelihood of critical failures.
By selecting the right migration scenario, carefully preparing for the process, and managing potential risks, you can ensure a successful phased migration that keeps your operations running smoothly while modernizing your infrastructure.
If you migrate 250+ users, don’t hesitate to open a migration ticket to discuss your migration needs and specifics with one of our qualified Cloud Migrations Managers who will be able to address your questions and advise you on the strategy plan.