Why Your Next Data Platform Migration Might Be the Best Decision You Ever Make
You can find the original post on LinkedIn.
Table of Contents
- Why Platform Migrations Feel Scary
- The Hidden Cost of "Just Keeping It"
- What I Learned at Glassdoor
- A Fresh Start
- Final Thoughts
Why Platform Migrations Feel Scary
The calendar invite appears with a simple title: "Platform Migration Planning." And you immediately feel yourself tense up.
Few phrases make data teams more anxious—and "platform migration" cracks the top 5. It’s a mixture of late-night deployment fixes, multiple roadmap strategy calls, and the inevitable question:
"Why is this taking so long?"
Platform migrations are both essential updates and time-sinks. You are promised better tools but threatened with breaking what already works.
I've witnessed 3 data migrations in my short career at Accenture and Glassdoor and I've developed a pretty positive stance around it:
We should welcome these migrations not just as necessary tasks but as a rare chance to clean years’ worth of technical debt that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
The Hidden Cost of "Just Keeping It"
You've seen it happen:
- Dashboards multiply in your BI tool, with no one quite sure which ones are still relevant.
- Your DAGs grow increasingly complex, with dependencies that no one fully understands anymore.
- Tables and views pile up in your warehouse, many created for one-time analyses years ago, kept around because nobody remembers if they're still needed.
During normal operations, the risk of removing anything—even outdated stuff—often feels greater than the reward. The default answer becomes:
"Let's keep it just in case."
But during a migration? Everything changes.
Suddenly, every dashboard, dataset, and DAG has a clear migration cost. The question shifts from: ❌ "Can we safely remove this?" ✅ "Is this valuable enough to move over?"
This creates the perfect conditions for you to identify the 20 dashboards that actually drive business decisions—out of 200. And just like that, you’ve eliminated 90% of your migration workload.
What I Learned at Glassdoor
I saw this firsthand during Glassdoor’s move from Airflow 1.x to 2.9, led by Zakariah Siyaji's platform team in partnership with experts from Astronomer.
What started as a version upgrade became something much more valuable.
"The migration gave us a reason to question everything. We could finally ask: ・Is this pipeline still needed? ・Does anyone look at this dashboard? ・Can we combine these similar workflows?"
A Fresh Start
Migrations aren't easy. They need:
- Careful planning
- Skilled execution
- A ton of feedback (more on this later 😬)
But think of it like moving houses after years in the same place. The process is disruptive—but it forces you to pick up each item and ask:
Is this worth bringing into the new home?
The result? A fresh start. A cleaner system. A smarter platform.
Final Thoughts
The next time your team sees "Platform Migration" on the roadmap, try reframing it. It’s not just a checklist item—it’s a rare opportunity.
The kind that gives you permission to challenge everything and rebuild what truly matters.