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The Product Owner’s Guide to Conduct Large Scale Cloud Migration Testing | Whitepaper
Large-Scale Cloud Migration Testing Guide
Moving applications and data to a new cloud environment is a major technology change. But migration is not complete just because the systems have been moved. Teams also need to make sure applications, services, data, integrations, and user journeys continue to work as expected.
This whitepaper explores the key QA focus areas for large-scale cloud migration, with a focus on an AWS to GCP migration. It explains where testing fits into the migration journey and what teams need to validate before, during, and after the move.
What Does This Whitepaper Cover?
A successful cloud migration requires testing across different parts of the application and technology environment. This whitepaper covers the main areas that QA teams need to consider, including:
- API and web service testing
- Middleware and job validation
- Functional and regression testing
- Integration testing
- Database and data validation
- Security and access validation
- Performance and scalability testing
- DevOps and CI/CD validation
- Test data migration
- Application and service monitoring
The whitepaper also highlights why QA should be involved throughout the migration, from initial planning and architecture changes to execution, monitoring, and post-migration validation.
Why Does Cloud Migration Testing Matter?
A cloud migration can affect much more than the infrastructure. Applications, databases, APIs, middleware, integrations, and other connected services may all change as part of the move.
Without proper testing, issues can surface after applications begin running on the new cloud platform. Teams need to validate critical functionality, data, integrations, security, and performance before and after the migration.
The whitepaper emphasizes the importance of setting up a working staging environment and having a clear plan for migrating and validating test data before production traffic is moved.
Key QA Focus Areas for Cloud Migration
Different parts of an application need different types of validation during migration.
API and Web Services: Check service health, functionality, requests, responses, and latency to make sure APIs continue to work correctly.
Application Functionality: Validate important business workflows, functional scenarios, and regression coverage.
Database Validation: Check migrated data and database operations across SQL and NoSQL environments.
Integration and Middleware: Make sure applications, services, queues, databases, and jobs continue to work together as expected.
Security: Validate privacy settings, access roles, authorizations, and database permissions.
Performance and Scalability: Check whether the new cloud environment can handle expected workloads and peak traffic.
DevOps: Validate the build and deployment processes used during the migration.
How Is Testing Performed During Cloud Migration?
Testing does not happen at just one point in the migration. The whitepaper outlines a phased approach that covers staging, production, and post-migration validation.
Staging Validation
Testing starts in the new cloud staging environment. Teams validate web services, databases, middleware, application functionality, and other critical components before production traffic is introduced.
Production Validation
Once the staging environment is ready, teams can begin validating the production environment as traffic is gradually introduced. Services, databases, middleware, application functionality, and other critical areas are monitored as traffic increases.
The goal is to validate the new environment before all real-time traffic is moved to it.
Post-Migration Validation
Testing continues even after all traffic has moved to the new cloud environment. The whitepaper recommends continued monitoring of application functionality and important business metrics before the legacy environment is fully retired.
How Do Automation and Monitoring Support Migration Testing?
Large-scale migrations require repeated checks throughout the process. Test Automation can help teams run existing test scripts against the new cloud environment with minimal changes where possible.
Monitoring and observability are also important for understanding how the application behaves during migration. The whitepaper discusses tools and practices for monitoring service health, latency, errors, user actions, APIs, databases, events, and CI/CD pipelines.
The migration example includes tools such as Grafana, Kibana, Lightstep, Redash, Jenkins, Spinnaker, Docker, and Kubernetes.
What Challenges Can Teams Face During Cloud Migration?
Large-scale migrations can create challenges around database conversion, production traffic, application dependencies, architecture changes, and validation across the old and new cloud environments.
The whitepaper documents a migration testing exercise where teams identified more than 100 backend issues and nearly 150 functionality issues during the testing phases. Performance observations were tracked separately.
What Will You Learn From the Full Whitepaper?
The complete whitepaper goes deeper into the testing approach used during a large-scale cloud migration. It covers:
- QA planning and key testing areas
- Staging environment preparation
- Database and test data validation
- Production traffic validation
- Automation and monitoring
- Migration risks and mitigation
- Post-migration testing
- Migration exit criteria
- Cloud migration QA checklist
The full document includes the detailed testing approach, validation stages, technical considerations, migration risks, and QA checklist.
Download the Full Whitepaper
Get the complete guide to understand how QA can support a large-scale cloud migration, from preparing the staging environment to validating production traffic and monitoring the application after migration.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is migration testing?
Migration testing is the process of validating applications, data, APIs, databases, integrations, security, performance, and business-critical functions when moving systems from one cloud environment to another. The whitepaper focuses on testing throughout the migration lifecycle, including staging, production traffic validation, and post-migration monitoring.
How to test migration data?
Migration data should be tested by validating data completeness, accuracy, integrity, and consistency between the existing and new cloud environments. The whitepaper recommends having a clear test data migration strategy, validating databases and CRUD operations, and using a database conversion utility where required. Production data and traffic should also be monitored during the migration to identify data loss or discrepancies.
What is an automation migration strategy?
An automation migration strategy uses existing automated tests to validate applications after they move to the new cloud environment. The whitepaper recommends migrating the infrastructure and services to a new staging environment first, then reusing existing API automation scripts with minimal configuration changes. Automated tests can then be executed repeatedly to provide ongoing health checks before and during production migration.
What are the five phases of cloud migration?
The five common phases of cloud migration are assessment, planning, migration, validation, and optimization. Teams first assess applications and dependencies, plan the migration approach, move workloads to the target cloud, validate functionality and data, and then optimize the new environment for performance, reliability, and cost.
What are the 5 Rs in cloud migration?
The 5 Rs of cloud migration are Rehost, Refactor, Replatform, Repurchase, and Retire. Rehost moves workloads with minimal changes. Refactor involves redesigning applications for the cloud. Replatform makes limited changes to use cloud capabilities. Repurchase replaces an existing solution with a different product or service. Retire removes applications or workloads that are no longer needed.