What is migration?
Migration is the process of moving data, integrations, and applications from an existing environment to a different environment. In an integration migration project, it involved migrating databases, integration artifacts, certificates, credentials.
Why migration is important?
As technology evolves, the enhancements in performance, advance security, and more efficient architectures would be available. As a result of this evolution, the new solutions might be cost-effective rather to maintaining the existing solution. Perhaps the integrations products that are being used might come to the end of support life time by the vendor.
Considering these circumstances it is important to have proactive migration strategies to avoid any potential pitfalls and remain at the forefront of digital transformation.
What are the key factors in a migration project?
Migration projects can be challenging if key factors are not considered. Let’s elaborate on a few key factors to be considered.
Technology Stack Compatibility of Integration Layer
The differences of the existing technology stack and the proposed technology stack is vital in an integration migration. Evaluating out of the box support from the proposed solution to facilitate the prevailing use-cases makes the migration effort more efficient. If the customizations are required, they should be identified and plan accordingly prior to the migration effort.
For example: In the existing integration environment, the file handling capabilities might not be supported out of the box and a customization might have been done to handle file operations. But, in the proposed solution, the file capabilities might be supported out of the box. In that case, customizations are not needed.
If the migration is being done within the same vendor, it is important to pay attention to the improvements and changes in the technology stack. This enables integration developers to alter the existing integrations to achieve better versions.
For example, a new configuration might have been introduced to improve efficiency with less resource consumption or some configurations might have been deprecated. In such cases, the use cases of those configurations should be examined in the existing integrations and change accordingly when moving the integrations to the proposed environment.
Architectural Changes
In a migration project, there can be architectural changes between the existing solution vs proposed solution to accommodate forecasted traffic, use cases and regulations. For example, there can be new file system integrations or removal of a file system. It could be a different message broker, proxy servers etc.
Having awareness of the architectural changes enables integration engineers to identify the potential changes in relevant integrations and plan out the migration more efficient way.
For example, in the existing integration environment, a dataset is available which will be processed as CSV file. But in the proposed solution, the data processing part might be done using a database.
These key changes help developers to understand the potential integration changes when migrating to the proposed environment.
Reusability
In a migration project, it is recommended to reuse existing integration artifacts as much as possible without redoing everything from the scratch to avoid inefficient development cycles.
For an example: there can be XSLT transformations in the existing solutions which are being used to transform requests or responses. There is a higher chance these XSLT artifacts can be used as it is.
If it is within the same vendor migration, chances are that the majority of the artifacts are supported in the new environment with minor or no changes.
Documents and Test Suits
Documentation acts as the source of truth for the integration. Well-structured documentations should clearly contain all the essential information such as integration design, integration flow details, transformations, connectivity details, credentials etc. Developers should follow a document guideline to ensure all the necessary details are documented. Further the document structure should be uniformed across all integration to improve the readability.
The integration engineers can refer to the documentation and get the context of each integration before the migration process. It would improve the efficiency of the process and reduce the regression issues as well.
The most efficient way to verify the functionality of an integration is automated testing. Hence it is important to have strong automated test suits covering not only the happy flows, but also the error flows and edge cases. This enables the verification process efficient for the integration engineers as well as testers.
Network Connectivity
An integration platform, specially a distributed system may connect with multiple components such as file systems, external systems, proxy servers etc. Hence, in the new environment, it is essential to ensure that all the communication channels are in place prior to the migration effort to make the migration effort more efficient.
There are occasions where the setting up the connection to an external system might take a few days due to adhering to the company protocols. For example, an external system might have to whitelist the new deployment’s IP addresses (or vice versa). For that it might need approval and could be time-consuming. Also, it could be that the external system might have to configure Mutual TLS with the new environment in order to establish the communication. If you experience connectivity issue during the migration/testing phase, it will slow down the process. But if you plan them in advance, it is going to be a smooth process.
Certificate and Credential Migration
As integration environments communicates with multiple systems to achieve the integration requirements, It is strongly recommended to use secure protocols such as HTTPS for the communication instead of HTTP. Also, it could be that the integration layer is generating JWT tokens or validating them. To facilitate these requirements, the integration environment should have the necessary certificates configured in the keystores.
Security is crucial in integration. Hence in order to communicate with external systems, the integration might be using API keys, client credentials, basic auth etc. Therefore, these credentials should be migrated to the new environment in order make sure the integrations work smoothly in the new environment.
Go-live Strategy
Go-live phase is one of the most significant phases of a migration project. It is highly recommended to do step by step integration migration and go-live rather than to migrate all integrations at once to mitigate any unforeseen risks involved in the migration process. When following this process, it is significant to choose a maintenance window such that the business impact would be minimum. Further, it is important to plan the traffic switching strategies. It could be canary or blue/green depending on the requirements. In an unlikely event, if the changes should be reverted, a fallback strategy is necessary.
Once the integration is deployed on the new production environment and the functionality is confirmed, it is recommended to plan the phasing out of the old integration and old environment to avoid unnecessary maintenance overhead.
It is highly recommended to have environment segregation such as dev, acceptance, and prod. Having the separation of environments enables developers to procedurally migrate and test integration and promote to higher environments.
Further it enables performance testing in acceptance environment and do capacity planning beforehand accordingly.
Conclusion
Migration is transferring data, integrations into a different environment due to better performance, new features, regulations, security etc. Proactive migration strategy is important in digital transformation.
The process of migration can be challenging if the key factors are not considered. Having a good understanding of the existing integrations and differences of proposed architecture and products enables smooth migration process. Planning the go-live strategy in advance helps the smooth transition of live traffic and mitigate risks.
If you have any questions related to migrations, please do not hesitate to get in touch with our experts at Yenlo.
