Infrastructure Migration

What Is Infrastructure Migration?

If you're in software development, you may find yourself working on infrastructure migrations. A migration is the transfer of data, information, or technology from one place, or system, to another. It's common for teams to migrate their infrastructure components. They may do this to improve scalability and performance, improve their caching layer, or transition from an in-house solution to a cloud-based one.
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As infrastructure migrations are often risky, you’ll want to plan ahead. Executing one requires lots of work, but you can mitigate the risk by using feature flags. These are useful because they allow you to slowly switch database providers without risking any data integrity. You can also use them to slowly switch from one cloud provider to another.

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Why Doing It Effectively Is Important

If you’re moving to a new infrastructure, take this time to do it right. Infrastructure migrations often come with an abundance of risk- but they don’t have to be that way. Feature flags are a great tool for managing transitions from one infrastructure component to another. You can use them to maintain data integrity, test the new system, deploy changes, and more.
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One of the most common misunderstandings about feature flags is that they are only useful for new features, or cosmetic changes. However, they are also helpful when it comes to database migrations. Testing is crucial for a digital transformation. Easily trying something out with live data for a subset of your user base, and being able to roll it back quickly if anything goes wrong, will make the process a lot smoother.

Using feature flags to facilitate migrations means little to no downtime. You can enable or disable the migration with little consequence to your customers. If you’re not getting the results you want, easily revert to your original site without much hassle.

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DevCycle is a feature management tool that allows you to leverage feature flags to ship faster, reduce risk and maximize the impact of your canary release. By leveraging feature flags, you can increase your release cadence with minimizing release complexity. 

Through continuously deploying and testing in production, you can organize your feature flags in several environments with our APIs without needing to leave your workflow. Developers, product and marketing teams can toggle a feature on or off in the DevCycle dashboard to control who has access.  

Your team can also predermine a rollout schedule to specify which users have access to a new feature and at what date. This means you can create a predetermined rollout period for a canary release and let DevCycle gradually deploy it based on the rollout schedule your team set up. 

DevCycle also enables you to maximize the impact of your canary release through zero latency experimentation build for developers. Iterate and optimize features with the ability to dynamically modify content in production without redeployments.  

Engineering teams can employ continuous integration and continuous delivery to keep up with competition. This practice will allow for faster development cycles, as well as the ability to deploy new features without risk of errors. Practices like canary testing can also help mitigate risk. 

Want to use feature flags for infrastructure migrations to improve your software development workflow? Get started with a free trial of DevCycle.

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