My company has been planning on shifting our production software service to a cloud service for quite some time, and the past two years we’ve been focused on getting our software to a point where we could perform a lift and shift of our data onto Azure. Initially our plan was to just move directly to VMs, but then Microsoft’s Azure SQL platform became rather enticing. It was cost effective (cheaper than running VMs of similar size), and easier to manage with an environment to keep it secure.

This begs the following questions (which will be answered in a future blog post)

• How do we migrate to Azure at scale?
  • Data requirements are around 1.5 TB per environment, which we have 4 of.
• How do we keep downtime of our production SaaS environment to a minimum?
  • Unfortunately software isn’t in a place where we can do independent migration of customers to new locations. Thats on the todo.

There will be a series of posts in the very near future about how we addressed these problems and more. As of writing this post, the project is still in progress, but in terms of automation code, its complete and initial testing of our staging environment has gone smoothly.