Migration looks different when the environment has 1,600+ servers spread across multiple datacenters.

At that scale, nothing is clean. Dependencies exist between systems built by teams that are gone, years apart, with no shared documentation. What documentation does exist describes what someone planned to build — not what actually got built.

The environment has been accumulating configurations for decades. Each one made sense at the time. Most exist silently now, waiting to surface during migration when it’s the worst possible moment to find them.

Working at that scale teaches you one thing fast: don’t trust the documentation. Verify the actual environment. That means running discovery tools against live systems, scripting against the real environment, and building a dependency map that reflects what’s there — not what the architecture diagram from five years ago says should be there.

Enterprise-scale migrations don’t demand more technical sophistication than SMB work. They demand more discipline about knowing exactly what you’re walking into before you touch anything.

What’s the biggest gap you’ve found between documented environment and actual environment — and how late in the project did it show up?

#Migration #CloudMigration #Infrastructure