In December 2016 Evernote migrated its entire production service–200 million users and 3 PB of data–to Google Cloud Platform in just 70 days. But in January of that year, running our service on a public cloud platform was an abstract concept, so we spent most of the year dissecting every aspect of our platform and trying to understand how to run it on someone else’s compute infrastructure. The culmination of that effort was a 10-month project plan, which we believed was pretty aggressive, but there was business pressure to move even faster. This is the story of how we radically rethought the timeline, the approaches we took, and the transformative effect it had on the migration team.

Nandu Shah is Director of Technical Operations at Evernote, where he ensures that 200 million people around the world can always access their most precious notes. Last year he led the migration of Evernote’s production service (150 million users, 1100 servers, 3 PB of data) to Google Cloud Platform in 70 days. For over 20 years, in roles spanning IT, software engineering, and operations, he has followed his passion for truly agile–with a lowercase a—approaches to getting things done.

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