Moving to the Cloud: You Need More Than Some Balloons

Abstract

As Northwestern University Library’s began preparation for migrating to Alma, we migrated Primo to the cloud. We learned things aren’t as simple as you might hope. We had little to no documentation on decisions and configurations that were made during the initial implementation of Primo. Coupled with a time crunch to complete the project, this made it exceptionally difficult to review configurations or make new decisions about functionality that had been introduced in later versions of Primo. During this process, we learned some valuable lessons that have already improved future projects .

Document your decisions - Documentation is often a thankless task that most people happily avoid. While it’s value isn’t immediately clear somewhere down the line your or someone else will be happy you did it. By know why you choose to do something it can make dealing with issues down the line much more simple.

Figure out the resources you need, but also those you might - While planning for this we never considered the need to manually move our normalization rules to the new system. While we had them to reference we needed someone that really understood them to copy them over to avoid mistakes. Luckily we were able to bring in the relevant experts but had they not been available it might have sunk the entire project.

The cloud means things move out of your control - The implementation of any product means you have to coordinate with the vendor of that product. When that product exists in the cloud, you might find several new layers or problems with this. In our case, some miscommunications with our central IT division about Shibboleth and LDAP meant some last minute pleading to get necessary work done.

Sometimes the simple things are the most time consuming - One of the things we thought would be pretty straight forward, establishing firewall rules and setting up some static ip addresses, ended up taking much longer than anticipated. Always try to identify slack in your project and make sure you know your dependencies and what work can be split up. Luckily we were able to get our VPN IP address added right away so this let us work around the larger issue.

Moving a system to the cloud can be scary proposition. There are any number of things that can go wrong. I hope our example demonstrates that even if some of the biggest possible things do go wrong you can not only still successfully complete your project, you can even do so under a strict timeline.