“Migrate your Atlassian environment to the cloud”
Nowadays, the TMC ALM phone often rings because organizations would like to migrate their Atlassian tooling from a server environment to an Atlassian Cloud solution. In the past years we have assisted customers by taking responsibility for the full migration of their Atlassian server solutions to the cloud as well as supporting them only during specific fases of the migration. Atlassian made it no secret that they have a strong focus on their cloud deployment and have adapted a ‘cloud first’ strategy for the coming years. They also took action to make it easy and convenient for their customers to migrate from server to cloud. An example can be found in this article by Atlassian, describing the migration steps. Still we encounter customers who struggle with some steps in their migrations. In the past years we have gained a lot of experience in the server to cloud migration process. What makes the migration seem easy but actually makes the migration more difficult than expected and which items should not be forgotten? We as TMC ALM, would like to share some of our experiences and unveil a tip of the iceberg of the most common server to cloud migration pitfalls and attention points in this blog.
Reasons for cloud
Reasons for going to the cloud may vary for different customers. We see that our customers would like to focus more on their core business and get rid of all the server and application maintanence and responsibility. With cloud, there is no infrastructure maintenance or product upgrade necessary. An 99.9% uptime assurance is possible by upgrading to Atlassian’s Premium plan(together with other advantages like: unlimited storage, 24/7 support, extra functionallity and a sandbox functionality). Last but not least, it is possible to quickly get up and running immediately.
We see also that Atlassian is focusing on cloud. In many cases, new features are released first on cloud, and then may (or may not) become available for server products.
In short, reasons for moving your Atlassian tools to the cloud are:
- Less maintenance and support responsibilities
- Flexibility and scalability
- Costs
- Functionality
- Ease of use
Considerations
- Add-on functionality can differ between Cloud and Server. Check the specifications or let us assist you, prior to the actual migration
- User management
- Add-ons or integrations may require a different API and or authentication
- Partial or full migration?
- No opt out for updates
TMC ALM can advise you on these topics and share knowledge on how make the transition as smoothly as possible.
Migration steps
Over the years, TMC ALM has performed various server to cloud migrations. Our support ranged from taking on the full responsibility of the migration to assisting with specific challenges our customers encountered. To assist our customers in the best possible way, we have developed a migration run-book with all the checks that should be done during this process. In general, our run-book guides us and our customers through the following steps:
- Assessment of the current environment
- Are the apps available in cloud?
- Can the data be exported or migrated?
- Is the functionality identical?
- Dependency on 3rd party data sources or integrations
- Is the current server version migration ready?
- Prepare the target environment
- Create the cloud instance
- Install the apps
- Inform the users about the coming change
- Inform about the migration and the planned outage
- Changes in the UI or functionality
- Update documentation and work procedures
- Perform the actual migration
- Data
- User management
- Configuration
- Test the migration
- You are ready to go!
This run-book can also be used for a test migration at a test URL. The actual migration is then the same as the sandbox migration, only at the “production” URL.
Sounds easy, right? In base, it is. Our experience as Platinum Atlassian Partner learned us that the difficulty is in the installed plugins. Migrating the data and get the plugins working as you are used to is not easy. We have gained a lot of experience with this and created separate plugin run-books and plugin migration tools. It also helps that TMC has, besides the Atlassian partnership, several other partnerships with plugins vendors. This gives us the advantage of having detailed insight in the plugin and direct contacts in case there is an issue. Specially popular add-ons like Comala and Tempo can be challenging to migrate.
By using our theoritical and hans-on experience, TMC ALM was able to develop test plans and scenarios to test you cloud environment thoroughly. We ensure your migration is a success and you can profit from all the benefits the Atlassian cloud deployment has to offer!
Are you planning a server to cloud migration? Feel free to contact us and to benefit from all the experience.
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