INTERFACE by apidays 2023 APIs for a “Smart” economy. Embedding AI to deliver Smart APIs and turn into an exponential organization June 28 & 29, 2023 System Migration Lifecycle Nitish Agarwal, Principal Software Engineer, GoDaddy ------ Check out our conferences at https://www.apidays.global/ Do you want to sponsor or talk at one of our conferences? https://apidays.typeform.com/to/ILJeAaV8 Learn more on APIscene, the global media made by the community for the community: https://www.apiscene.io Explore the API ecosystem with the API Landscape: https://apilandscape.apiscene.io/

1. System Migrations/Consolidations
made easier manageable with APIs
Nitish Agarwal (@nitishagar)
Principal Engineer @ GoDaddy

3. Business Lifecycle

4. The promise

5. “According to most studies,
between 70 and 90 percent of
acquisitions fail.”
Don’t Make This Common M&A Mistake by Graham Kenny
https://hbr.org/2020/03/dont-make-this-common-ma-mistake

6. What happens after acquisition?
○ Consolidate bits and pieces i.e. absorb whats’ useful
○ Big-bang consolidation
○ Failed consolidation! Parallel businesses

7. What mostly
happens..
Big-Bang
Migration/s

8. What it looks like?
● New “Hunger Games” announcement everytime.
● Feature prioritisations from scratch to look at what to keep and
what to dump.
● Deep-dive into parallel stacks with large data-sets both historical
and on-going.

9. Issue we run into...
○ The volume of data might not be conducive to use of existing APIs
○ Teams have on-going feature roadmap (working on a moving train)
○ No single point of contact or system (1000s of microservices)
○ Authentication mechanisms do not support service-to-service interaction
○ Rate-limiting might not be flexible
Custom / Tailored solution built everytime

10. What if there is a
route other than
custom
development?

11. Red Pill
○ Creating dedicated migration/consolidation team/s
■ Responsible for all the infra and shim for APIs used in migration/consolidation
activities
○ Upside: Single point of contact; Maintenance of core infra with single team
○ Downside: Can go out of hand with increased functionality / evolving architectures
etc.

12. Blue Pill
○ Shared responsibility model for teams to create their own APIs
○ Upside: the owner of the system knows best on how to facilitate bulk data imports
○ Downside:
■ Fresh migration/consolidation required coordination with multiple teams
■ Consistency issues and think of items which come while working with multiple
teams

13. Red Pill!
And the winner is...
Red Pill!

14. What has worked for me in the past
○ Having a dedicated team with diverse skill-set much like devops teams
○ Dedicated APIs to facilitate migration/consolidation requests
■ In conjunction with arch. models which use some form of connectors
helping distribute responsibility to individual team/s

15. Remember the dev-ops model...
that can work in different settings as well

16. Backchannel
APIs
Lets define what I mean by that..

17. Backchannel APIs
Development Cycle
Standardised Mapping
Connectors
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18. System structuring
● Based on your organisation size we
can choose how the functionality for
API are split.
● In some ways the function of our
backchannel APIs starts to look like
an API Gateway. For illustration purpose only.
Source: https://tinyurl.com/bulk-api-reference

19. No silver bullet!
But having dedicated backchannel
APIs have helped me with 10+
migrations with consistent velocity.
Backchannel APIs
need more attention

20. Thanks!
Reach me at:
Nitish Agarwal
@nitishagar (most places)
nitish.agarwal@outlook.com