How Stellantis moved 150.000 Jira issues to the cloud, without downtime

ACA Group and Exalate worked closely together on a migration approach that would allow Stellantis to move and transform its data without interrupting day-to-day work. Using Exalate’s synchronization technology and Groovy scripting capabilities, the existing Jira Server environment could be continuously synchronized with the new Jira Cloud environment while the data was cleaned up along the way.

Duplicate issue types were merged, custom fields consolidated and old workflows mapped to the new setup. Historical information such as old issue keys, assignees, reporters and timestamps was preserved in custom fields, so it remained accessible after the migration.

This meant Stellantis didn't need a separate cleanup project before or after the migration. The cleanup happened as part of the migration itself.

For around 25 days, the Exalate app continuously synchronized the old and new Jira environments at a rate of roughly 5,000 issues per day.

Throughout the migration, ACA Group and Exalate worked closely together to keep the synchronization running smoothly while data was transformed and moved to the new environment.

In the meantime, Stellantis teams continued working in the existing Jira environment as usual. Their changes were synchronized to Jira Cloud in the background, so there was no need to freeze the system or interrupt day-to-day work while the migration was underway.

By the time go-live arrived, the heavy lifting was already done.

During the final switch, write access on the old server was disabled, read and write access in Jira Cloud was enabled, and outgoing emails were activated. Instead of an overnight big-bang migration, the go-live came down to a handful of configuration changes and took only minutes.

Around 150.000 issues were successfully migrated to Jira Cloud, including attachments, comments, work logs and linked issues. 

Teams experienced no downtime throughout the migration. On Monday morning after go-live, users simply started working in the new environment. The Stellantis project team reported virtually no migration-related complaints and received positive feedback about how smoothly the transition had gone.

More importantly, Stellantis didn't just end up with the same Jira environment in the cloud. It gained a cleaner, more streamlined setup, with consolidated fields, redesigned workflows and its valuable historical data still accessible.

A complex migration became an opportunity to start fresh.