Successful technology migrations are dangerous when the system architecture is complex, convoluted, integrated, and highly intertwined. These are the conditions where making even small changes can have catastrophic consequences because dependencies are not entirely known, and problems cascade through the entire system.

Furthermore, these conditions lead to the loss of freedom of action — teams can no longer independently make changes without vast amounts of communication, coordination, consensus, and approvals.

On the other hand, when architectures are more decoupled, technology migrations become safer — small changes can be independently developed and delivered to customers quickly, safely, and more easily. Many technologies and tools can assist and help us better prepare and control how migrations turn out overall.

Just as continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) enable an important technical practice, feature management enables another distinct and important architectural practice, which LaunchDarkly brought to the masses — which everyone should be using. It helps teams deliver more value, but also enables work to be fun for everyone in the technology value stream.

In this presentation, I'll present some of the top learnings from my 25 years studying high-performing technology organizations, and the insights I've gained on how important architectures are from my upcoming book, "Wiring the Winning Organization: Unleashing Our Collective Greatness Through Simplification, Slowification, and Amplification," co-authored with Dr. Steven Spear.

Modern software development requires a modern tech stack. And while adopting new technology components into your stack is a constant (and a necessity in order to keep pace with competition), many teams haven’t found a safe and efficient way to do so. Join John Kodumal, CTO and cofounder of LaunchDarkly, along with Kate Holterhoff, Industry Analyst at RedMonk, for a discussion about what they’re seeing in the market and how to approach modernization and migration for the next generation of software delivery.

This session will cover:

• Why technology migrations are inevitable and why teams need a better blueprint for them
• How to maximize the business value of your modernization efforts
• How leading teams approach migration and modernization– from cloud, to databases, to APIs, and more

Database migrations are some of the most complex and risky migration projects. Moving data, ensuring consistency, and keeping your mission critical systems whole and running are key considerations for teams embarking on the challenge. But there is a better, less risky way to approach a database migration. Join Paul Wright, Senior Director of Engineering at LaunchDarkly, to explore how LaunchDarkly migrated from Mongo and PostgreSQL to CockroachDB with confidence.

This session will cover:

• Key strategies and benefits for migrating a database gradually 
• How to avoid downtime and protect user experiences 
• Techniques for validating performance and correctness

By eliminating nightmare “big bang” migrations, validating performance every step of the way, and recovering from failures in milliseconds, teams using LaunchDarkly take the pain out of their technology migrations. Join Director of Developer Relations, Cody De Arkland, and Head of Product, Karishma Irani, for a tour of the LaunchDarkly platform that will show you how to pull off your next migration in a safer, faster, and more predictable way.

This session will cover:

• What key capabilities LaunchDarkly offers to accelerate and de-risk migration
• How you can flexibly target your audience using any parameter
• What the LaunchDarkly product team is building to further improve technology migrations

Does your stomach churn at the thought of a lengthy, expensive technology migration? If it does, you’re not alone. Join engineering leaders who’ve been in the trenches to discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of their technology migrations and what they’ve learned along the way.

This session will cover:

• Real takeaways from cloud, database, and API modernization projects 
• How to adopt new technologies in a safer and less disruptive way 
• Strategies for balancing managing technology with building new features

Many organizations begin their journey from monolithic architecture to transform these systems into modern microservices architecture. In this session, learn the details of this transformation, exploring approaches to incrementally decompose your monolith into serverless microservices. We also show you how to break a monolith to a modernized architecture as part of the planning phase and accelerate your migration to AWS.

This session will cover:

• The Strangler Fig Pattern when breaking down the Monolith as part of a workload modernization.
• AWS services that can help you modernize your architecture
• An introduction to AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces.