High traffic app that can’t take downtime - Data migration

When you can't take downtime, the “trick” to data migration is: Think small changes.

1. New table
2. Update writes to go to old and new
3. Background job to migrate old data to new
4. Move reads to new table
5. Stop writing to old table

Each of these steps is a deploy.

Comments

[Nick Holden]

This tip is 🔥!

For Rails apps, I love using the strong_migrations gem to encourage small, safe steps like these.

[Ben Halpern]

👌

[Ritikesh]

I would recommend checking LHM out if you're on rails. We have used it for multiple major migrations and it works like a charm.

[Mike Coutermarsh]

See on 2. Write to both tables

[Gijo Varghese]

Oh sorry, I thought it only writes to new one