Do it live! Fitbit's zero-downtime migration to GCP

Опубликовано 15 сентября 2020, 15:58

In 2019, Fitbit moved all of its production operations from managed hosting to Google Cloud Platform without any downtime. The Fitbit experience is provided by a monolithic application backed by 200+ data stores, making the task of moving service by service impossible. Fitbit decided to run services in both hosting environments and move user by user. This is the story of Fitbit’s migration to GCP, which was tested and executed mostly in production, without any effects to the users.

To successfully migrate, Fitbit reviewed their goals and requirements for the migration. What should the user experience be during this period? How to know if benchmarks are being met and the process can push forward? How to slow or reverse migration if things weren’t going well? Answering these questions led Fitbit to a migration plan that started with the movement of internal users, followed by the careful transplant of a small number of real customers, and concluded with a mass migration of the majority of our users.

This migration path required significant new additions to Fitbit’s architecture, including new testing, routing, and caching techniques. As the journey approached its conclusion, Fitbit recognized that these methods were not merely allowing for migration; they were allowing Fitbit to operate in multiple hosting environments simultaneously. The lessons from this migration have provided the foundation for a multi-region architecture that will unlock the full potential of life in Google Cloud Platform.

The tale starts with a review of Fitbit's goals and requirements for the migration. What should the user experience be during this period? How to know if benchmarks are being met and the migration can push forward? How to slow or reverse migration if things weren’t going well? Answering these questions led Fitbit to a migration plan that started with the movement of internal users, followed by the careful transplant of a small number of real customers, and concluded with a mass migration of the majority of users.

This migration path required significant new additions to Fitbit’s architecture, including new testing, routing, and caching techniques. As the journey approached its conclusion, Fitbit recognized that these methods were not merely allowing them to migrate; they were allowing Fitbit to operate in multiple hosting environments simultaneously. The lessons from this migration have provided the foundation for a multi-region architecture that will unlock the full potential of life in Google Cloud Platform.

Speaker: Sean-Michael Lewis

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event: Google Cloud Next 2020; re_ty: Publish; product: Cloud - Compute - Compute Engine; fullname: Sean-Michael Lewis;