Introducing Shorter Migration Windows Preview: Enhancing the Connect Data Residency Experience

Data Residency
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We’re excited to announce a significant improvement to the Connect Data Residency experience, Shorter Migration Windows. This feature is designed to minimise downtime during realm migrations, making the process more efficient and less disruptive for our enterprise customers.

Why Shorter Migration Windows?

Planning for a 24-hour migration downtime can be challenging for customers, especially when this needs to be scheduled multiple times as apps begin supporting migrations. Our data shows that over 99% of app migrations are completed within 2 hours. This insight, along with feedback from customers and partners led us to rethink and optimise the migration process.

How It Works

With the introduction of Shorter Migration Windows, Connect developers can now specify the expected duration of a realm migration for their customers. This allows for a significant reduction in the required downtime, improving the overall customer experience. To implement this change, partners need to update their app descriptor to include the maxMigrationDurationHours parameter. This parameter allows partners to set the estimated migration duration, ranging from 0.5 to 24 hours. The example below demonstrates how to configure this setting:

"dataResidency": { 
  "maxMigrationDurationHours": 2 // default is 24 hours, maximum is 24 hours 
}

You can read more here

FAQ

What happens if a migration takes longer than the defined period?

  • Like it does currently, if a migration takes longer than the defined maxMigrationDuration, the migration will timeout and fail.

What happens if a migration takes less time than the defined period?

  • In the event a migration takes less time than the defined maxMigrationDuration, if all migrations for that customer are finished, they will be brought back online earlier.

What happens when maxMigrationDuration isn’t defined?``

  • If maxMigrationDuration isn’t defined, the current default of 24 hours will apply.

Customer Experience

Customers will benefit from greater transparency and predictability in the migration process. They will be able to view the expected downtime for their apps as they migrate.

Note: The migration downtime for a customer is the highest maxMigrationDuration provided among Apps in the migration.

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Looking Ahead

Based on our observations that more than 99% of migrations are completed within 2 hours, we will be reducing the default downtime for realm migrations from 24 hours to 2 hours starting in September. This change will streamline the migration process, reducing interruptions for our customers and aligning more closely with actual migration times.

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Great initiative! I also think shortening the migration windows is a good and necessary improvement.
I had two thoughts coming to my mind:

  1. Max Migration Duration Hours vs. Estimated Duration. I assume for most apps the duration depends on the amount of data the app stores for that customer. Why didn’t you choose an approach where you call an API at the app which estimates how long the migration takes for that customer? IMHO, that would produce way better results.
  2. Shortening Planning Migrations. Currently, an app migration needs to be planned three days in advance. With shorter migration windows, do you also have plans to shorten that? I don’t really understand this limitation in general. Side Note: That’s one of the biggest blockers I see for testing app migrations as a developer.
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Hi @matthias

Thanks for the response, apologies I missed this reply.

To answer your second question, we definitely understand that the 3 days lead time is a friction point for both adopting and testing DaRe migrations.

We are currently investigating what would be required to lessen that to a shorter duration, expect a RFC in the next couple of weeks about this topic.

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