In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations are increasingly looking to modernize their IT infrastructure by transitioning from legacy systems to advanced, scalable cloud platforms. Snowflake, a leader in cloud data warehousing, offers a solution that meets the demands for flexibility, scalability, and performance.

At the forefront of facilitating these transformations is Next Pathway, the leader in Snowflake migrations, with our AI-enabled SHIFT Product Platform. This suite, comprising of Crawler360, SHIFT Cloud, and Tester, simplifies the complex process of cloud migration.

This article delves into how each component of the SHIFT Product Platform plays a crucial role in planning, translating, and testing during the migration to Snowflake, ensuring a seamless transition and operational efficiency.

Cloud Migration Planning with Crawler360

The journey to cloud migration begins with meticulous planning. Crawler360 excels in this initial phase by automatically scanning and cataloging legacy data sources, such as ETL pipelines, scheduler jobs, and downstream consuming applications. This process yields actionable insights that accelerate the migration to the cloud. Crawler360 facilitates strategic planning of the entire migration process by:

• Scanning and visualizing the entire legacy code base, including code composition and job complexity grouping.
• Categorizing jobs such as Ingest, Transform, and Outbound pipelines, and establishing end-to-end job lineage from Scheduler to ETL Pipelines to Source/Target Tables.
• Identifying downstream lineage and dependencies between consumer data sources and pinpointing 'dead' or 'orphan' jobs that can be excluded from the migration process.

Crawler360's capability to define relationships across siloed applications and understand their interdependencies is vital. It identifies redundant data sets for consolidation and pinpoints "hot and cold spots" to prioritize workloads for migration. This level of insight is invaluable for companies aiming to effectively estimate costs, size, and initiate their migration journey, eliminating guesswork and manual analysis that often hinder enterprise customers.

Automated Code Translation with SHIFT Cloud

With the cloud migration plan in place, the next challenge is translating legacy workloads into a format compatible with Snowflake. SHIFT Cloud addresses this challenge by automating the conversion of code and workloads directly into Snowflake's format. This automation significantly reduces the need for manual coding, which is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. SHIFT Cloud's automated translation capabilities ensure that legacy applications and databases are swiftly and accurately converted, facilitating a smoother transition to Snowflake.

Testing with Tester

Ensuring that migrated applications perform as expected in the new environment is imperative. Tester, a crucial component of the SHIFT Product Platform, provides automated testing solutions essential for validating application performance post-migration. Tester's capabilities include:

• Automating the creation of structurally and referentially correct test data, facilitating the identification and resolution of defects in the translated code during the migration process.
• Delivering full coverage of the translated code through the test cases it creates, contributing to the preparation of the code for final User Acceptance Testing.

While Tester ensures comprehensive test coverage by intelligently scanning the code base and creating test cases, it focuses on validating the translated code against these test cases rather than ensuring compatibility with all possible hardware and software configurations or verifying that all existing functionalities work as in the legacy application.

Conclusion

The combination of Crawler360 for planning, SHIFT Cloud for translation, and Tester for testing forms a powerful trio that streamlines the migration of legacy workloads to Snowflake. This integrated approach not only accelerates the migration process but also enhances cost efficiency, ease of use, and scalability. By leveraging Next Pathway's SHIFT Product Platform, organizations can confidently transition from legacy systems to Snowflake's cloud data platform, solidifying our position as a leader in Snowflake migrations.

About Next Pathway

Next Pathway is the Automated Cloud Migration company. Powered by the SHIFT Cloud, Next Pathway automates the end-to-end challenges companies experience when migrating applications to the cloud. For more information, please visit nextpathway.com.