You are migrating, Great! Just don't leave baggage behind

 

Wanted to share with you after long time since I wrote last time, about important learning I had after migrating from one artifactory to another 

We were in a need to move to a new artifactory because of managed version vs legacy one, and we decided to do the migration in a parallel mode

Essentially we are going to publish to new artifactory and old one so that we know we are starting to gather insights if all is published correctly and not fail ALL of our current service who rely on old one.

We also did another step and took the CURRENT used version from old artifactory and copied it to the new one, thinking that once we update a service to use new artifactory we know that

1. Publishing will work
2. Consuming will work also (since current and future version are their)

This was a good process that was working and actually we are fully migrated and everything works as expected... (old one was decommissioned also)

After few weeks, we came to a situation that we needed to go back in time and git bisect a problem to identify when a regression was added.

To be able to go back in time and be able to compile your version, code is not enough and you need to bring historical packages also  and i guess you know where this is goin at!

So we reached a point that going too far in time, used old packages that are not in the new artifactory and the old one ... well.... its decommissioned! 

Our only way is to republished or extract from backup!

Note to self - When ever you migrate, make sure you copy EVERYTHING you can and not settle for current or short history only, this applies to

1. Git history - you are doing a massive migration from old infra to a new --> either you work on the same repo or i a new one than you can move the history in offline (most will work hopefully)
2. Artifactory - move everything from history, since you will need it at some point
3. Knowledge - make sure all knowledge captured till now, is also moving !

Hope it helps you also