An exciting journey about Atlassian Cloud Migration

[Pushpkant Garg]

Hello Everyone, 

I am Pushpkant, I am an Atlassian Consultant at Modus Create. I have helped numerous organisations successfully migrate to Atlassian Cloud. Last month, we migrated one of our clients from Data Center to Jira Cloud. It was a long journey for us where we had many rounds of discussion with the stakeholders explaining them the nietigirites of the migration and had to explain them the challenges in this activity. Since it was a large enterprise the complexity of the project was extreme. Here are more details:

• Company & your role: Modus Create, Atlassian Consultant

• Size of your company: 500 (Customer Size: more than 5000 users)

• Atlassian products your team uses? Jira Software, Jira Work Management,  Confluence, Bitbucket (User by Customer)

• Which teams use Atlassian products - dev, non-dev, both? Both

• Integrations or key apps? : GitHub, BitBucket, UCD, Clockify, Service Now, Smartsheets

Now to the good stuff…. (pick and choose here - these are prompts to get you started!)

• What surprised you most about the migration to cloud?: Use of JMCA app which made the migration process really easy. It helped in migrating the data in Phased manner rather than doing the lift and shift method. 

• What technical a-ha moment helped you get across the finish line?:
  • Migrated the data with minimum (or no) data loss
  • Migrated all the Tempo Data without any data loss to cloud
  • Links between Jira and Confluence were retained
  • Links between Jira and Bitbucket commits were also retained

• What advice would you give other customers starting a migration? What do you wish you’d known?: 
  • Strategise the migration in such a way that you have enough time for validation and testing.
  • Contact Atlassian as early as possible
  • If you have large data and complex configuration, do consider having support from an Atlassian Solutions partner.

• What migration strategy and method did you use?: Use cloud migration assistant

• What’s the best part of life in cloud post-migration?: Ease of use and Less Maintenance

[Jack Brickey]

@Pushpkant Garg , given all of your experience with these migrations it would be wonderful if you could share:

• some of the things to consider, e.g. things you may have to live without
• pitfalls you have seen and how to avoid
• Tools or methods that really help you be successful
• etc.

[Huwen Arnone]

Hi @Pushpkant Garg,

It's great to be aware of Cloud migration use cases.

Here you mention a couple of key apps, and my question is: Did you have to put aside any other app that didn't support the migration process, or did the cloud (or other apps in the cloud) fulfilled the necessities you have?

Thanks ahead for your response; I'm curious!

[Pushpkant Garg]

@Huwen Arnone There are many apps and both the scenarios are valid and encountered. 

If I list a couple of major apps which need to have manual data migration

• Tempo
• xRay (Now data can be migrated via JCMA app)
• Zephyr

There are many apps which we discontinued after this migration. One of the major app is "Script Runner for Jira". The unavailability of behaviours on Cloud is a BIG turn off for this app. JWME is a good alternative to this plugin. There are many features of Scriptrunner is replaced by Automation for Jira. 

There are many apps which are available on Server but not on Cloud. We have to leave them and look for alternate plugin or Custom solution to be configured. 

Let me know if I have answered your queries. 

Thanks 

[Huwen Arnone]

This is very interesting and insightful. Thank you very much for taking the time to share this information 🙌👏🏼👏🏼

[Rogério Paiva - Xray Xporter]

Hi all,

Xray was amongst the first Apps to be included in the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant.

And this method has been successfully used by many customers.

In case of any incident, please get in touch with Xray Support (http://xraysupport.getxray.app); we would gladly assist you.

Thank you.

Kind regards,
Rogério Paiva [Xray Support Team]

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

Hi @Pushpkant Garg and thank you for sharing your journey! How long did the whole process (pre-migration -> migration -> testing) took? Did you keep a migration runbook?

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

@Pushpkant Garg can you provide me with an answer concerning my questions? Thank you!

[Pushpkant Garg]

Hello @Alex Koxaras _Relational_

Apologies for delayed response. Have been very busy lately with migration stuff. 

There are multiple factors which determines the timeline of the project. It varies between 3 weeks to 3 months. Currently, I am working on a project which is running from last 4 months and we are going-live in Nov. 

• Pre-Migration takes around 2-3 weeks which involves Discovery and Clean-up depending on the complexity of the Server instance. 
• Dev/UAT Migration takes 1-2 weeks including fixes for issues identified during migration
• Testing is important part of the migration. You should give users at least 1-2 weeks.
• I always suggested teams to do at least 2 migration before prod. This helps you understand Issues and challenges during first round and Second round of migration will help you determine the actual time required for Prod Migration

Hope this helps. 

Thanks,

Pushpkant Garg

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

Awesome! Thank you for the info @Pushpkant Garg! Really helpful!

[Pallavi Swamy]

@Pushpkant Garg 

I'm interested in knowing more about the phased approach.

1. How did you group the data in phases? meaning which ones did you choose to migrate first? and last? 

2. How did you handle the project dependencies? I can imagine for example projects like Service Desk has relationship with many other projects - how did you handle this? 

3. How did the phased roll out happen? - were these specific projects made read only once migrated to cloud? did you freeze the server changes? 

4. Did you have people having to use both cloud and server for a period of time? 

5. Anything else you would like to share we need to consider for phased approach? 

Thank you for sharing your experience. Hopefully we learn from you and not repeat same mistakes in our migration. 

[Laura Holton _Valiantys_]

Thank you for sharing @Pushpkant Garg 🙌