// Tech Talk //

How To Migrate Any Cloud Application With Minimal Downtime

Published on April 19, 2021 · Updated on April 27, 2021
How To Migrate Any Cloud Application With Minimal Downtime

Want to get help with migration planning? Fill out this form and we’ll be in touch!

Video

About the Talk

Don’t get stuck with a cloud provider just because you don’t know how to escape! Learn how to migrate with confidence and perform a low or zero-downtime cloud migration of all or part of any application.

What You’ll Learn

  • How to audit your infrastructure in preparation for a cloud migration
  • How to effectively plan and execute a migration
  • How to build applications with possible future migration in mind

This Talk Is Designed For

Business leaders and entrepreneurs who want to avoid vendor lock-in by understanding how software applications move between cloud providers.

Prerequisites

Knowledge of web technologies and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) products.

Resources

Slides

Migration Checklist

  1. Verify lower TTLs have propagated
  2. Verify code (stateless services) has been deployed on new host
  3. Verify stateful services are ready to receive state on new host
  4. Change connection strings on all NEW services to point to new host
  5. Change connection strings in codebase to point to new host*
  6. Disable writes on all stateful services*
  7. Download current state from old host
  8. Upload current state to stateful services on new host
  9. Perform testing on new host for final verification
  10. Point public DNS to new host*
  11. Re-enable writes on new host*

*Indicates a step NOT taken during migration dry runs

Key Terms

Migration is moving code and state from one physical location to another.

Code is the stuff that doesn’t change unless you deploy something new.

State is the data your application creates as it runs. It’s customer accounts, uploaded photos, product descriptions, anything that your developers didn’t put in their version control system (probably Github).

Read-Only means a service can still respond to requests for data, but can’t make changes to its dataset.

Latency is the time it takes for packets to traverse the internet between physical machines.

Time to live (TTL) — All DNS records have this one value in common: TTL, which determines how long the record can remain cached before it expires.

Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Learn more about us


About the authors

Still looking for an answer?

Ask a questionSearch for more help

Was this helpful?
 
Leave a comment


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

card icon
Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Sign up
card icon
Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We’d like to help.

Learn more
card icon
Become a contributor

You get paid; we donate to tech nonprofits.

Learn more
Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow – whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more ->
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel
Get started for free

Enter your email to get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.

New accounts only. By submitting your email you agree to our Privacy Policy.