Jira migrations happen overnight? Think again.

[#1]

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone; and yes, talking about Jira. :)

I thought a lot about July's topic, mostly how to write an article about clouds and migrations from my marketing perspective (as you already know, I'm not a technical writing type, not At All). I wanted a short article: experience with migrations, pains, benefits, a few jokes. And the final decision was writing about our professional services team and the whole company experience in Cloud/Server/Data Center migrations.

If we are good at building apps for Jira, we are more than better in Jira migrations, and our Atlassian Award for Technical Excellence proves it. Our small team is passionate about finding new ways and solutions, they are committed to excellence in each operation, they are great company for a beer, and good friends. When someone says to me phrase like "This is impossible," I'm thinking of the PSO - they are enjoying such phrases.

"Because nothing is impossible in the World of Atlassian, you only need to know the right dance steps."

me.

We have a team of 7 with a history of over 5 123 migrated Jira projects in 71 Jira servers with 9 456 331 Jira issues. 0 issues reported after the migrations. 

How? HOW? I'm working with simple marketing, and one of our newsletters reach its audience with the subject "Subject" thanks to me. A millions of issues and 0 errors is a universe which I don't even deserve to touch! Aliens.

As a regular Jira user, all you want is your system to be up and running, and your day at work - smooth and productive. If something goes wrong, you blame the Jira admin, and nervously wait for him to fix the issue. If everything is fine - you'll barely notice his existence (or any existence at all).

You are familiar with the standard hero pattern in cartoons and movies, right? The Hero saves the day and stays in the spotlights long enough to be noticed. Yes, Batman leaves the scene, but not before hearing the magic words "Look, it's Batman!". Narcissists. :) 

In this line of thought, our PSO team is working from the shadows, far far away from the spotlight. You log into your Jira account, start your daily routine, and don't even remember the migration notification from last week. This lack of knowledge must stop! And Grumpy is here to save the day!

Jira migrations DON'T happen overnight. 

Each migration is carefully prepared months before the keyword "overnight". Five phases, days of development, staging, production, and support; if your Jira has a dog, there will be a dedicated team member for its daily walks.

While you sleep, teams are watching over your instance instead of enjoying their weekends (then help you adapt to your new environment). Remember this the next time you hear about "weekend migration", and say "Thanks" to the people responsible for it. :)

Why the noise?

Because migrations are necessary: applications grow in numbers, size, and complexity, administrators are overwhelmed with managing multiple instances, Enterprise customers are looking to maximize their application runtime.

If you are running a small company with one Jira or Confluence instance, good for you! If you strive to grow, at some point, the migration to Cloud or Data Center is inevitable. Mergers and acquisitions are another strong cases which require the consolidation of data dispersed across countless application instances.

Benefits and return on investment are also a game-changer: not just the better collaboration and visibility between teams, but the reduced cost for administration and licensing. Have this in mind and don't worry - teams are here to help.

And remember: Change is always for good :)

[Petr Vaníček]

Hi,

I fully agree with your "migrations are necessary". Sometimes it's easy if those instance are not customized so much.

I have experience only with few of instances with upgrades like 3.x to 6.4.x or 5.x to 7.x, but with those standard instances it's "easy" even though it's several platform releases.

I have more fear from heavy customized instances with huge use of groovy scripts, add-on post-functions,... where it can fu**ed up very easily. It's take a lot of time on TEST environment, but still it can surprise somehow. Like my latest upgrade of instance of our customer. There was problem in "translation" between custom field name and customfield ID (seems like JRASERVER-65922), but interesting is it has been resolved by customer with upgrade of operating system (W2008 R2 vs W2012 R2) - so sometimes your years of experience are useless in that cases.

And I like that - you are still learning even you have a lot of experience with Jira or other app and upgrades.

[Peter T]

Hi Petr,

you are right, you cannot relax at all, but rather keeps your hands dirty all the time.

I would add add-on private data to the list of challenges next to heavy customization. The last things are existing bugs that might trip you and you need to maneuver around them or apply your own fixes.

Cheers,

Peter T