Recently realestate.com.au acquired a business called 1Form, a website enabling the streamlined management of applications for rental properties online. Since its creation in 2006 and alliance with realestate.com.au in 2011, 1Form has enabled renters all over Australia to apply for housing in a secure and hassle free manner. In this talk I will outline how my team went about migrating the application from its previous hosted infrastructure to realestate.com.au’s AWS infrastructure within 3 months and all the challenges that came with it; like: Assessment of the internals of the application Security analysis Infrastructure planning QA and Deployment pipelining Unforeseen obstacles e.g. DAMN YOU HEARTBLEED Domain knowledge transfer Monitoring and Alerting infrastructure planning AND MORE … And things we did well, things we did not do well. All this in the hopes of providing a real world example of how all the good things about a shared mindset between people operational and software engineers with a common goal makes at times very challenging projects smooth, fun and worthwhile.

1. ACQUISITION, OWNERSHIP &
MIGRATION OF LEGACY
APPLICATIONS
aka OH MY GOD ISTHIS PHP ?
aka WHY OH WHY OH WHY!
aka I told you PHP would not die without holy water.

2. Mujtaba Hussain
Software engineer @ realestate.com.au
Senior at cloud formation starer
Strategic at stack trace swearer

3. GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENT
• “Learnings” is not a word.
• “Lessons”, is.
courtesy: icanhazcheeseburger.com

4. 1FORM

5. • Understanding and planning ownership.
• Doing the migration.
• Handover.
• Why DevOPS?
MY AIM
courtesy: memegenerator.net

6. MAIN REASON FOR SUCCESS
• Different skills.
• One team.
• Understanding.
• Internal ownership.
courtesy: memegenerator.net

7. MEANINGFUL PAUSE ….
Courtesy: @nonspecialist

8. SO YOU ARE THINKING OF BUYING
SOMETHING …
• Understand what you are buying …
• Understand why you are buying …

9. PLEASE SIR, CAN I HAVE LOOK?
• Where is it?
• Can you get at it?
• Make it the source of truth.
courtesy: bitbucket & github

10. TEST RUN.
• Get it up and running as soon as possible.
• Doesn't need to be a full production stack
• Performance & Pen testing.
courtesy: gifsoup.com

11. IS IT SECRET? IS IT SAFE?
• White box analysis.
• Issues?
• Deployment?
courtesy: php issues

12. FIRST FEW UPDATES
• Terms and Conditions.
• Outgoing communications.
• About us.
• Contact us.
• Customer Care.

13. MOVE IT, WILL YOU?
• Where is it now?
• Should you move it?
• Do you have time?
courtesy: dreamhost.com

14. COMMUNICATE
courtesy: agile india

15. THE PIPELINE
• Set up a deploy mechanism.
• Automated manner, repeatable.
• Absolutely no snowflakes.
• Make it fast. As fast as you can.
courtesy: jenkins.org

16. MINE, MINE, MINE, MINE, MINE
• Distractions.
• Competing work.
• Existing snowflakes.
• Unknown unknowns.
courtesy:Word Clip Art

17. DAY OF RECKONING
courtesy: icanhazcheeseburger.com

18. THE DAY (USUALLY NIGHT) OF
RECKONING!
• Clean plan. Step by step.
• Pager?
• Downtime?
• Third party support.
• Post migration testing.
courtesy: icanhazcheeseburger.com

19. BACK TO THE FUTURE.
• Technical debt.
• Internal handover.
• Prioritised post migration work.

20. LESSONS
• Understand, while working together.
• Test together.
• Move it, together.
• Plan well, and be patient with one another.
• Deploy and celebrate together.

21. PROFIT?
courtesy: modular.co.in

22. @khalidaapps
mujtaba@mujtabahussain.net
courtesy: modular.co.in