The Migration Wasn’t Hard-Living With It Was
Article summary
The Migration Wasn’t Hard-Living With It Was The dashboard lit up green. Cutover complete. Traffic had flipped. The infrastructure team cheered, posted the graph on Slack, and headed home. It should’ve felt like victory. But the next three weeks broke something deeper than uptime. We planned for transition. We forgot to plan for existence. The migration-monolith to services, or data center to cloud, or Java 8 to Kubernetes-was technically smooth. But post-migration, the team slowed. Fixes took longer. Alerts fired without clear owners. Tickets stacked up in limbo. Nobody knew who to ask. Everyone felt slightly less safe. We had changed the platform, not the behaviors. Our runbooks were stale. Observability tools didn’t match the new flow. Alarms pointed to logs that didn’t exist anymore. Playbooks assumed SSH access that didn’t exist in the new VPC.
Read Full Article on MediumPractical takeaway
The main idea behind The Migration Wasn’t Hard-Living With It Was is to help teams move from broad theory to clear, repeatable decision making. When teams apply this thinking, they reduce ambiguity and focus on improvements that deliver measurable momentum.
Example scenario
Imagine a team facing competing priorities. By applying the ideas in The Migration Wasn’t Hard-Living With It Was, they can map dependencies, identify risks and choose the next move that produces progress without destabilizing their system.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Trying to redesign everything instead of taking small steps.
- Ignoring real constraints like incentives, ownership or legacy systems.
- Creating documents that do not lead to any change in code or decisions.
How to apply this in real work
Start by identifying where The Migration Wasn’t Hard-Living With It Was already shows up in your architecture or delivery flow. Then pick one area where clarity would reduce friction. Apply the idea, measure its effect and share the learning.
Signs you are doing it correctly
- Teams make decisions faster and with fewer disagreements.
- Architectural conversations become clearer and less abstract.
- Changes land safely with fewer surprises or rework cycles.