The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 51

Enabler #4 - Automation with a Factory Approach The key to address the scale, velocity and safety challenges in a migration project is to incorporate automation and reusability. As more and more tasks are automated, the migration process becomes easier and can be scaled, increasing the safety and velocity of migrations. Migrations at scale require a factory approach. This uses a mix of tools and processes to improve quality, accuracy and precision. In terms of tooling, selecting the right mix of tools and investing time and effort to developing the required automation will achieve the required scale and velocity. Besides the tools, you need a process and an orchestration layer that addresses all facets of a migration, including sequencing, configuration, dependencies, testing and validation. You must also have an enablement program in which additional staff are trained and deployed based on the demands of a large scale migration. In addition, an automation and factory approach will help reduce downtime during a migration, user errors introduced by manual tasks and traceability requirements. In many instances, an existing CI/CD and governance system may suffice for applications where the deployment is highly automated. However, if auto- mated deployment is not available (e.g., for COTS applications and the Rehost pattern), you need to develop it yourself or use out of the box auto- mation provided by third-party tools. SPECIAL EDITION 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 49