Anyone who’s been through a cloud migration will tell you it can be a painful process. No team wants to sift through years of accumulated data to identify what stays and what goes. The process is about as appealing as cleaning your grandparents’ attic, and potentially with more surprises. That’s why teams are looking for ways to make the process as smooth and free of surprises as possible.
The Praecipio team has helped hundreds of companies transition to the cloud, and we’re constantly searching the ecosystem for options and partners to assist in that effort. One of the most critical tools in our migration kit is Appfire’s CMJ Cloud Migration Tool.
Let’s take a look at some of the tool’s features and explore some potential use cases.
The Migration Process
We’re not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of the migration process today, but to provide context around some of the features we’ll cover, it’s essential to understand the process at a high level.
Setup
The setup of the tool is straightforward, with a few steps to ensure success:
- You’ll first install the tool like any other Atlassian add-on from the Marketplace on your Server instance. This app is free, so you can explore the features and functionality as much as you want.
- Once you’ve installed the on-prem app, you’ll need to install its cloud counterpart. You can get a trial license for this app, which can be installed in the same way as any other cloud add-on.
- Next, create an API token for your site to allow the on-prem add-on to talk to your cloud environment. Head to Atlassian’s Support site for a walkthrough of setting up an API token.
- Once you’ve created your token, you can create a connection between your on-prem site and your cloud environment.
Create a Migration
With your environments able to talk to each other, you can now plan your migration. Under the main page for CMJ, you’ll find a dashboard that tracks the ratio of projects and issues you’ve migrated in your instance, as well as a list of reports around the migrations you’ve created. We love this dashboard because it’s sleek and clean, providing all the relevant information at a glance.
Creating your migration is easy:
- Create your migration and name it
- Attach your previously-configured cloud connector (or create a new one)
- Select the projects you wish to migrate
- Run the Analysis
- Review and resolve any data conflicts
There’s some nuance to work through, and the above example is a very simplified representation of the process designed to highlight the value of the tool’s core capabilities.
Key Features
Expanding on the process above, I’d like to highlight a couple of things that the CMJ Cloud Migration Tool does especially well:
Error Handling
Like its on-prem counterpart, the single best feature this software has to offer is the ability to handle error correction against your data before migrating. Using the in-line correction tools, there’s no chance of accidentally migrating broken data into your cloud environment, and you don’t have to wait until the end of the migration process to receive errors.
The analysis function checks data before migration to give you a clean and detailed overview. No migration is perfect; usually, the older the instance, the more potential there is for issues. The CMJ Cloud Migration Tool does a great job of ensuring none of that erroneous data makes its way into your cloud environment.
Selective Migration
Another powerful feature of the CMJ Cloud Migration Tool is its ability to provide an overview of projects and issues on your instance that have already been migrated. This can help with phased migrations for larger enterprise customers that have too much data to move in a single migration window. It’s also handy if you have specific teams that are ready to move to the cloud ahead of others or if you have specific projects that aren’t intended to be brought over. This, combined with the ability to choose all or a subset of projects in the migration creation phase, gives you a lot of flexibility.
Data Transformation
One of the most useful features of the CMJ Cloud Migration Tool is the ability to apply data transformation mappings as part of the migration process. This includes things like renaming configuration objects like Projects, workflows, schemes, filters, etc. without having an impact on your source instance. You can map out any data transformation changes you need to make as part of your migration effortlessly.
Conflict Avoidance
For combination migration/mergers, this feature is a game-changer. Sometimes, a customer comes to us with an existing cloud environment and an on-prem environment they’re looking to migrate and merge into one. This is an especially challenging scenario, and any merge migration will likely include data elements that conflict on both sides, like custom fields, workflows, or any global Jira object.
In these merge/migration scenarios, some efforts have to be duplicated in both environments. This could be because one team decided to start over in the cloud or because the permissions were set up such that a certain group couldn't access data from one environment or another. Regardless, duplicate or conflicting data is often the rule, not the exception.
The CMJ Cloud Migration Tool allows you to identify these conflicts in-line during the testing phase of your migration so you can get a full sense of what to expect and make a plan to resolve them. This normally has to be painstakingly done before the migration, or worse – several manhours are lost to clean up in the target instance after the fact.
The Future of the CMJ Cloud Migration Tool
In its current state, the CMJ Cloud Migration Tool already has a lot of great features and functionality. It truly is a top contender for companies looking to do an on-prem to cloud migration of their Jira instance. However, there’s still a lot to be excited about from Appfire’s roadmap of the tool:
Cloud-to-Cloud Migration
Right now, one of the most nebulous migrations we perform is cloud-to-cloud. There’s currently no solution available to directly merge the two instances together, and the process involves exporting and importing the cloud sites to an on-prem solution and re-importing the final product into the cloud.
This can be a complex and cumbersome endeavor depending on how the sites are configured, because of the feature differences between cloud and on-prem. It would be a massive win for everyone if the final evolution of Appfire’s CMJ Cloud Migration Tool allowed users a smooth merge/migration process in the cloud as they have with server/data center instances.
Rollbacks
One of our favorite features of the CMJ Cloud Migration Tool is the rollback functionality. If there’s an error in the migration, the app immediately kicks off a rollback and provides an error log when complete. There’s nothing else like this that exists currently for cloud migration.
Once the data is moved, it’s still there in the original instance. If something is wrong or you only get a partial migration, it can be a bit of a bear to restore the instance to a usable state. Having a built-in rollback functionality that will revert the target instance to its pre-migration state automatically saves time and provides peace of mind.
This feature can also be useful in testing. Sometimes, it can be hard to pinpoint what’s going to work and what’s not without just testing a migration. A rollback feature frees up the time it would take to restore a test environment if there are still adjustments to make.
Conclusion
Every migration is different, and the right tool for the job is essential for success. The CMJ Cloud Migration Tool has a lot to offer out of the box, and the roadmap for the future looks incredibly promising. For more on how Praecipio has used the CMJ Cloud Migration Tool to help our customers transition to the cloud, check out Appfire's article, Streamlining Migrations: How Praecipio Utilizes CMJ.
If you’re an enterprise customer with a large instance with a lot of history behind it, you’re going to need a solution to match. Praecipio is Cloud Specialized, and our 100% migration success rate guarantees you’re in good hands no matter the shape and size of your Atlassian infrastructure. Our migration architects have a suite of industry-leading tools at their disposal, including Appfire’s indispensable CMJ Cloud Migration Tool. See how our team can help you realize the full potential of the cloud.
