Consolidation as the path for improved collaboration
The consolidation was mandatory to ensure better teamwork and governance. The business case for the cloud was focused on price and reliability.
The first step to consolidating the instances required an analysis of both applications. Valiantys decided the best step to move forward was to merge the two instances prior to moving it to our hosting. We decided to merge the smaller instance into the target instance first. The smaller containing 8 projects and the larger instance 75. Another factor was the number of plugins installed. The smaller instances had a set of plugins that had less complexity compared to the larger instance. In order to retain data integrity, it was better to maintain this within the larger instance.
Before commencing with the actual consolidation, the versions of the instances did not match. This can cause issues when moving the data over. We began with an upgrade of one Jira instance to match the version of the larger instance. Once the upgrade was complete we moved the Jira projects one by one whilst paying close attention to any conflicts that might arise. These conflicts can range from configuration items naming such as the Permission Scheme or Project Keys. Even though some of the naming conventions were the same, the teams worked differently meaning we had to import them as new configuration items. This was fixed by simply renaming fields before importing them.
Similar steps had to be carried out for Confluence, as they had 2 instances, one containing 62 spaces and the other 31 spaces. One of the instances being an older version, we had to carry out another upgrade and then move each space one by one avoiding any conflict in Space Keys and names.
Once the merge of the instances was complete and tested, we were ready to move them over to the Valiantys Cloud.
Part of the consolidation process was to also ensure any integration worked as intended. Integrations to Bamboo, Bitbucket, and Confluence had to retain their links as we moved each project over. Each project would have links to individual repositories. This meant once we had moved each instance into our managed hosting, all the application links would have to be updated. This included all references to each application in order to prevent any dead links. With our expertise in databases, we were able to make simple work of this and ensured each team was able to reference any data sitting in another application as they were previously.
Migrating to the Cloud for savings and peace of mind
Once the merge of the instances was complete and tested, we were ready to move them over to the Valiantys Cloud.
Their initial estimates showed cloud as 10% more expensive than current costs, but when the team brought in Valiantys to help optimize configurations, the final cost estimate showed savings in the longer term that were significant as opposed to sticking to their current systems infrastructure.
Valiantys collaborated with the company’s IT team on how to rethink how it operated to achieve the cost savings, including things like turning off test, staging and QA environments when not in use, leveraging automation, running elastic environments, and rethinking architectures.
The company decided to migrate part of its infrastructure to Valiantys Cloud. This move was mainly motived by the reduction of responsibility to manage these servers and high reliability with disaster recovery and responsive SLA times.
During the initial migration, the company left some projects out of the scope. As the team began working on their new platform hosted on the Valiantys Cloud, switching between instances became cumbersome and collaboration began to decrease. The company, therefore, decided to migrate this remaining project to not only consolidate its licenses but slowly retire the resources allocated to the instance.