the migration kit
Nine apps moved from consumer hosting to the corporate platform — and the process itself became the product.
team one internal documentation; platform specifics generalized.
The fleet was prototyped fast on consumer hosting, then systematically re-platformed onto the agency's internal AWS container platform — nine apps with full database continuity and zero hard cutoffs (every retired instance got a redirect page, not a dead link). The first migration was done the hard way; everything learned went into a stack-agnostic guide, a per-app checklist, and a platform reference grounded in the platform's actual CLI behavior and source code, not just its docs.
The deliberate part: the guide is written for AI coding agents to execute — numbered lessons, exact failure signatures, operational norms like “don't spam redeploys; rollouts take time to settle.” It was upstreamed to the shared knowledge repo so the whole team's agents inherit it.
Full case study in progress — artifacts pending clearance or writing time. The insight below is already earned.
A migration you'll do nine times is a product. Write the runbook precisely enough that an agent can execute it, and the ninth migration is boring — which is the goal.
the insight