kahunaburger

By now, even the least frequent visitors have noticed that something is wrong. Wrong is actually the wrong word, busy would be more fitting.

We are nearing the end of the development cycle of my current project and, as always, things heat up at the end. They heated up to a point where most of my “normal” life was put in the freezer until we are down with everything. If everything goes as planned, we’ll be done around midnight tonight (11/20).

I’m responsible for the migration of old user accounts on www.acrobat.com. To give you an idea how big a task this is: we are talking about more than 8.5 million user accounts, more than 10 million documents occupying 100s of terabytes of disk space. Later this afternoon we are going to take the old site down, work feverishly for a few hours and then throw the switch to bring the new, updated site back online. My migration code will start operation during the down time and will continue to run for at least 3 weeks. You heard right, 5 high-powered computers will prioritize all those users/documents and will translate them within the coming weeks from the old environment to the new one. This not only has to happen as quickly as possible, but also in a way that users coming to the new site are not being slowed down by the migration running in the background. Quite an interesting problem to solve.

No matter where in the world you are, if you open a window that points towards Santa Fe around midnight, you will hear the biggest sigh of relief you’ve ever heard …