---
title: "Migrations"
description: "134 posts about Migrations, summarised, each linking to the original."
---

# Migrations
> 134 posts about Migrations, summarised, each linking to the original.

## Articles

### [TAYFA Built a No-Code Website Builder in Seven Days](https://yomu.fyi/post/tayfa-built-a-no-code-website-builder-in-seven-days.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Published: Dec 2, 2020
- Type: Explainer

Supabase compiles case studies detailing how organizations across industries build applications, scale infrastructure, and migrate databases. Organizations adopt the platform for capabilities including managed Postgres, Authentication, Row Level Security, Data APIs, and Supabase Vector for PostgreSQL vector embeddings. Reported operational outcomes include Shotgun reducing data infrastructure costs by 83 percent, Quilia cutting development time by 75 percent, and Good Tape achieving a 60 percent cost reduction. Several teams completed platform migrations to Supabase, including Mobbin migrating 200,000 users from Firebase, Bree moving from Fauna, and Firecrawl transitioning from Pinecone. Furthermore, organizations like Replenysh implemented one-time passwords within 24 hours, while Xendit shipped a production solution in under one week.


### [Porting fairseq wmt19 translation system to transformers](https://yomu.fyi/post/porting-fairseq-wmt19-translation-system-to-transformers.md)
- Company: [Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face.md)
- Author: Stas Bekman
- Published: Nov 3, 2020
- Type: Tutorial

The fairseq WMT19 news translation system was ported to the Hugging Face transformers library under the FSMT architecture. Development began with an initial proxy notebook emulating the transformers API before implementing native configuration, modeling, tokenization, and checkpoint conversion scripts. The author first targeted English-Russian models to handle complex dual-vocabulary requirements and directly evaluate output quality during testing, later extending the implementation to merged-vocabulary language pairs. Although model ensembling was omitted due to library limitations, removing fairseq optimizer states reduced the final model download footprint from 13GB to 1.1GB. The implementation was validated locally against converted fairseq checkpoints and merged into the main codebase after two weeks of iterative review.


### [ShipIt! Presents: A Look at Shopify's API Health Report](https://yomu.fyi/post/shipit-presents-a-look-at-shopify-s-api-health-report.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Aug 25, 2020
- Type: Explainer

On July 17, 2020, ShipIt! hosted a discussion of Shopify’s API Health Report with Shuting Chang, Robert Saunders, Karen Xie, and Vrishti Dutta. The tool was built to surface breaking changes affecting Shopify Partner apps, and the event presented its role alongside the work of the multidisciplinary team behind it. Related materials cover Shopify’s API versioning, including how Shopify manages versioning and breaking changes, plus GraphQL Admin API references, an explorer, and learning resources. The event information also directs questions about API versioning and upcoming migrations to monitored API forums, the Partner Dashboard Support Form, and ShopifyDevs on Twitter, while linking to Shopify Partners, Shopify Developers, and REST/HTTP API evolution material.


### [Alpha Launch Postmortem](https://yomu.fyi/post/alpha-launch-postmortem.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Paul Copplestone
- Published: Jul 10, 2020
- Type: Incident / postmortem

An unexpected viral submission on Hacker News prompted sudden alpha traffic for Supabase, attracting 30,000 visitors and over 1,400 signups in one week. The surge strained initial infrastructure, which initially relied on a single server running Docker Compose for middleware and Digital Ocean for customer databases. System bottlenecks emerged rapidly, including hit limits on Digital Ocean droplet counts, frequent physical server faults, and a three-hour provisioning outage when Cloudflare reached its 1,000-subdomain limit. In response, the team migrated middleware to multiple globally load-balanced ECS clusters via AWS Global Accelerator. Supabase also transitioned 1,800 servers from Digital Ocean to AWS t3a instances, nearly halving database startup times from 90 seconds to 50 seconds.


### [Go Modules- A Guide for monorepos (Part 1)](https://yomu.fyi/post/go-modules-a-guide-for-monorepos-part-1.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Michael Cartmell
- Published: May 29, 2020
- Type: Problem & solution

Grab transitioned its large Go monorepo dependency management from Glide to Go modules while retaining an existing vendor directory structure. The team generated root go.mod configurations from glide.yaml and used go mod vendor without directly enabling module-mode builds. Incompatible nested sub-vendor paths were excluded by placing empty go.mod files, relying on the rule that modules cannot contain other modules. Post-migration maintenance revealed challenges with dependency inheritance and implicit go.mod updates during builds, which engineers investigated using go mod graph and digraph to trace dependency paths.


### [Developer Platform updates Spring 20'](https://yomu.fyi/post/developer-platform-updates-spring-20.md)
- Company: [Zoom](https://yomu.fyi/company/zoom.md)
- Author: Michael Purnell
- Published: Apr 21, 2020
- Type: Announcement

Zoom introduced several updates across its developer platform alongside new roadmap milestones for 2020. Marketplace enhancements include a Developer Dashboard tracking install numbers and API usage, as well as dynamic OAuth scope configurations that distinguish mandatory and optional permissions. For client development, the WebSDK adds Microsoft Edge Chromium compatibility with video and VOIP support, whereas the iOS SDK incorporates Xcode 11 support. Due to increased developer demand, Zoom updated its V2 REST API rate limits and delivered new chat webhooks tracking message, channel, and member activity. Upcoming platform initiatives include the permanent termination of all legacy V1 APIs on May 31, 2020, platform security enhancements, and an iframe-free JavaScript embedding framework for the WebSDK.


### [What’s New and What’s Coming for Zoom Marketplace in 2020?](https://yomu.fyi/post/what-s-new-and-what-s-coming-for-zoom-marketplace-in-2020.md)
- Company: [Zoom](https://yomu.fyi/company/zoom.md)
- Author: Benjamin Dean
- Published: Feb 14, 2020
- Type: Announcement

Zoom announced several updates to its App Marketplace alongside roadmap deadlines scheduled for early 2020. Marketplace enhancements include functional app categories, additional URL fields for Terms of Use and documentation, and support for defining multiple webhook event subscriptions within a single application. Administrators and developers gained webhook logs, enhanced pre-approval permission settings, and the ability to test draft applications directly in the installed apps interface for Data Compliance API compliance. To accommodate surging traffic, Zoom introduced revamped V2 REST API rate limits and breaking behavioral changes to the List Users API. Crucially, the platform set an absolute end-of-life date of April 26, 2020, for all legacy V1 APIs, requiring immediate migration to V2 endpoints.


### [How Shopify Manages API Versioning and Breaking Changes](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-shopify-manages-api-versioning-and-breaking-changes.md)
- Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md)
- Author: 2023-10-18
- Published: Dec 17, 2019
- Type: Explainer

Shopify describes how it versions APIs and manages breaking changes for an ecosystem of tens of thousands of partners. It releases date-based API versions every three months, with changes introduced in an unstable version and represented in the monolith through frozen records and a change file. Teams classify changes by whether third-party developers must migrate, use impact analysis and forward-compatibility testing, and protect uncertain changes with beta flags. For necessary breaking changes, tooling marks breaking or possibly breaking request paths, sends metadata through Monorail to a data warehouse, and produces reports on affected calls. Runtime conditionals then help teams manage old and new behavior, measure adoption, identify remaining risk, and communicate with developers.


### [Upgrading Kickstarter to Rails 5](https://yomu.fyi/post/upgrading-kickstarter-to-rails-5.md)
- Company: [Kickstarter](https://yomu.fyi/company/kickstarter.md)
- Author: Logan McDonald
- Published: Nov 6, 2017
- Type: Problem & solution

Kickstarter upgraded its main Rails application to Rails 5, alongside payments app Rosie, to support site security and performance while moving a nine-year-old legacy codebase forward. The team planned a three-month project, upgraded Ruby 2.2.5 to 2.4.x, classified release-note changes, resolved dependency conflicts, used Rails’ upgrade script, and moved through twelve documented steps. Work included merging Rails 4.2-compatible fixes, repairing nearly 4,000 CI test failures from a roughly 70 percent coverage baseline, removing deprecations, smoke-testing major flows, backporting more than thirty pull requests, and preparing reviewers and deployment contingencies. The upgrade met its timeline without rollbacks or major downtime, although untested bugs increased Zendesk tickets and exposed issues involving ActionController::Parameters, tracking events, and mobile applications. A retrospective emphasized planning, documentation, cross-team communication, and broader native-team participation for future upgrades.


### [Migrating Existing Datastores](https://yomu.fyi/post/migrating-existing-datastores.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Nishant Gupta
- Published: Aug 8, 2017
- Type: Problem & solution

Grab's Identity team faced imminent memory exhaustion on a single Redis node used to cache mobile authentication tokens under rapid user growth. Because read traffic outweighed write traffic by roughly 200 times, the team opted for an AWS ElastiCache cluster with three shards and two read replicas per shard. They executed a zero-downtime, six-phase migration plan while handling a peak load of 20,000 queries per second. The migration transitioned through initial one-time data replication, asynchronous shadow writes, synchronous dual writes, asynchronous read validation, switching primary reads, and final write cleanup. Controlled by feature flags and monitored with metrics at every stage, the migration completed without invalidating tokens or causing service disruptions.


### [Scaling Like a Boss with Presto](https://yomu.fyi/post/scaling-like-a-boss-with-presto.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Aneesh Chandra
- Published: May 1, 2017
- Type: Problem & solution

Grab experienced severe performance degradation, long queue times, and connection timeouts on its Amazon Redshift analytics cluster as user concurrency and reporting workloads expanded. Although an initial Amazon S3 data lake decoupled storage from compute, business users required standard SQL interfaces rather than Spark data pipelines. The team deployed Presto clusters on AWS EMR, switching their storage format from AVRO to Parquet to support ANSI SQL querying directly against S3. Utilizing a shared Hive metastore on Amazon RDS allowed Grab to adopt a shared-data multi-cluster architecture that isolated distinct workloads across dedicated compute clusters. This setup enabled rapid cluster scaling, streamlined failover, and matched Redshift performance on partitioned time-range queries.


### [Battling with Tech Giants for the World's Best Talent](https://yomu.fyi/post/battling-with-tech-giants-for-the-world-s-best-talent.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Grab Engineering
- Published: Jan 18, 2017
- Type: Explainer

Grab maintains research and development centres across Singapore, Seattle, and Beijing to develop mobility and transaction platforms for Southeast Asia. Engineer Brandon Gao turned down an offer from a major Seattle-based technology corporation to remain at the company due to rapid growth and high engineering impact. During backend infrastructure changes starting in May 2015, Grab transitioned core services from Node.js and Ruby to Golang. A weekend Golang prototype created by Gao evolved into the primary data service linking backend servers to 580,000 drivers across the region. Additionally, his initial work on the User Trust team established a machine-learning risk and fraud detection system supporting large-scale mobile transaction volumes.


### [This Rocket Ain't Stopping - Achieving Zero Downtime for Rails to Golang API Migration](https://yomu.fyi/post/this-rocket-ain-t-stopping-achieving-zero-downtime-for-rails-to-golang.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Lian Yuanlin
- Published: Oct 18, 2016
- Type: Problem & solution

Grab transitioned its public passenger app APIs from a legacy Rails application to a Golang service-oriented architecture to consolidate its codebase and engineering teams. Initial attempts to proxy traffic through a cloned Rails server via gRPC were abandoned after encountering TCP load imbalances during autoscaling events and memory leaks in the gRPC Ruby gem. The team pivoted to direct logic migration, porting Ruby logic directly into Go while decomposing modules into standalone services. Verification relied on log-based load testing and live shadow testing, where write operations were safely validated using mock data access layers that evaluated expected database outcomes. Production rollout progressed endpoint-by-endpoint using requests-per-second traffic throttling and prewarmed AWS Elastic Load Balancers before executing the final DNS switch.


### [How We Migrated to Active Record 4](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-migrated-to-active-record-4.md)
- Company: [Heroku](https://yomu.fyi/company/heroku.md)
- Author: Owen Ou
- Published: Nov 4, 2015
- Type: Problem & solution

Heroku Platform API had remained on Active Record 2.3.18, released in March 2013, creating maintenance and security burdens as support ended and custom query infrastructure replaced newer features. The team moved first to Active Record 3.0.20, preserving 2.x APIs, then directly to 4.2.4, using a feature branch, console-driven fixes, automated and acceptance tests, private deployments, staging, and a partial production rollout. The first step took one engineer about two weeks, while the second took two engineers about two weeks; deployment had no downtime but briefly required a rollback for an acts\_as\_paranoid bug. Performance improved 18% from 2.3.18 to 3.0.20 but worsened 13% from 3.0.20 to 4.2.4, challenging micro-benchmark expectations. The upgrade ultimately left performance at the same overall level, removed patches, restored supported status, and made future updates and training easier.


[Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/topic/migration/page/6.md)