The Migration Cookbook

Enterprise migrations are hard: The new platform is usually not quite ready yet, nobody fully knows what the old tool did, management wants everything to be done by yesterday, and your users don’t want their favorite toys taken away.

That’s why there is an entire scientific field devoted to “change management.” In this talk, we will explore how its lessons apply to the real world: - Why are migrations so painful, and what are some common patterns? - What are some of the proven techniques to avoid (or at least: limit) tears during migrations? - Which technical approaches can power our wonderful migration plans? - What are some of the policies and governance models to streamline these processes? - How to not lose the fun while doing all of this?

Robert draws on a decade of shepherding tens of thousands of internal users from a fragmented tool landscape, through multiple sunsets and deprecations, to a unified monitoring platform at Google SRE.