Common Migration Concepts

This chapter establishes the foundational concepts that apply across all migration scenarios, regardless of which cloud platform you’re leaving or which specific services you’re transitioning. Understanding these common patterns helps plan effective migrations and avoid pitfalls that derail projects.

Understanding the Fundamental Shift

Migrating from cloud services to self-hosted infrastructure represents more than a technical change—it’s a philosophical shift in how your organization relates to its data and systems.

With cloud services, your data resides on vendor servers under their terms of service. Monthly subscription costs accumulate indefinitely, and you have limited control over when updates occur or which features change. Your integrations depend on vendor-specific APIs that can evolve without your input.

Self-hosted infrastructure inverts this relationship. Your data lives on infrastructure you control, whether physical servers, your own cloud accounts, or hybrid arrangements. Setup costs replace ongoing subscriptions, and you decide when to update and which versions to run. Standard protocols replace proprietary APIs, giving you freedom to swap components without rewriting integrations.

This shift brings responsibility alongside freedom. You become accountable for security, backups, and availability. The trade-off is worthwhile for organizations that value data sovereignty, predictable costs, and independence from vendor decisions.

Component Equivalencies

Understanding how cloud services map to self-hosted alternatives helps plan migrations systematically. Cloud storage services translate to S3-compatible object storage like MinIO, which implements the same API that applications expect. Email services map to self-hosted mail servers using standard SMTP and IMAP protocols. Identity providers correspond to authentication servers implementing OIDC and SAML standards.

These mappings matter because they define what changes and what stays the same. Applications using standard protocols often work unchanged after migration—you simply point them at new endpoints. Applications tightly coupled to vendor-specific features require more adaptation.

General Bots leverages this standardization extensively. Its components communicate through standard protocols, making it compatible with various backend implementations. This design philosophy means migrating to General Bots doesn’t lock you into another proprietary ecosystem.

The Migration Process

Successful migrations follow a predictable sequence of stages, each building on the previous one.

The assessment stage inventories what exists in your current environment. Which services are in use? How much data do they contain? What integrations depend on them? Who uses them and how? This inventory becomes the foundation for all subsequent planning.

Planning translates the assessment into actionable steps. For each service and dataset, you determine how it will move, in what order, and with what dependencies. This stage identifies risks, establishes timelines, and allocates resources. Thorough planning prevents the chaos that results from ad-hoc migration attempts.

Testing validates your approach before committing to it. Migrate sample data and verify it arrived correctly. Connect applications to test instances and confirm they function. Identify issues while stakes are low and corrections are easy.

Execution performs the actual migration according to your plan. Depending on your situation, this might happen all at once during a maintenance window or gradually over weeks as different components transition. The plan determines the approach; execution follows it.

Validation confirms that everything works correctly in the new environment. Users can access their data. Applications function normally. No content was lost or corrupted. This stage provides confidence that the migration succeeded and that you can decommission source systems.

Common Challenges

Certain challenges appear across virtually all migration projects, regardless of source platform or destination infrastructure.

Data volume creates logistical complexity. Large datasets take significant time to transfer, especially when bandwidth is limited or costs apply. Storage must be provisioned in advance to receive the data. Planning must account for the reality that moving terabytes takes time, and some services remain unavailable during transfer.

Authentication presents a particular challenge because passwords cannot be exported from cloud providers. Users will need to establish new credentials in your self-hosted identity system, either through password reset flows or by setting up federation between old and new systems during a transition period.

Dependencies between services complicate migration sequencing. If Service B depends on Service A, you can’t migrate B before A is ready. Complex environments have webs of such dependencies that constrain migration order. Identifying these dependencies during assessment prevents blocked migrations during execution.

Custom workflows built on cloud-specific features need attention. Automations using proprietary APIs, integrations with cloud-native services, and customizations that assume cloud infrastructure all require evaluation and potentially reconstruction using self-hosted alternatives.

Tools and Approaches

Different migration scenarios call for different tools, but categories remain consistent across platforms.

File migration tools handle moving documents and media. Some sync directly between cloud storage and your new object storage. Others export to intermediate formats for later import. Bulk download utilities retrieve everything for offline transfer when direct sync isn’t available.

Email migration requires specialized attention due to the complexity of mailbox data. IMAP synchronization tools can copy messages while preserving folder structure. Export utilities produce archive formats that import tools can consume. The specific tools depend on both source and destination platforms.

User migration extracts identity information for recreation in your new system. Directory export tools produce CSV or LDIF files containing usernames, email addresses, group memberships, and other attributes. APIs enable programmatic extraction when bulk exports aren’t available.

Managing Risk

Migration inherently involves risk—the possibility of data loss, extended downtime, or failed transitions. Thoughtful risk management makes these possibilities manageable rather than catastrophic.

Always create backups before beginning migration activities. Even if you trust your tools and process, having verified backups means that mistakes are recoverable. Test backup restoration to confirm backups actually work.

Start with small datasets to validate your approach before scaling up. Migrate one user or one department, verify success, then expand. This incremental approach catches problems early when impact is limited.

Keep source data intact until migration is completely validated. The ability to access original data prevents a migration problem from becoming a data loss disaster. Only decommission source systems after thorough validation and an appropriate waiting period.

Document everything about your migration—the process, the decisions, the exceptions, the issues encountered. This documentation helps troubleshoot problems, supports auditing requirements, and creates institutional knowledge for future projects.

Maintain rollback plans even if you hope never to use them. Know how you would restore service if migration fails partway through. Having this plan reduces pressure during execution and provides a safety net that enables confident decision-making.

Moving Forward

With these common concepts established, subsequent chapters address platform-specific migration guidance. The Microsoft 365 Migration chapter details extracting data from Microsoft’s ecosystem. The Google Workspace Migration chapter covers Google-specific considerations. The Knowledge Base Migration chapter explains how to transform documents from any source into searchable bot knowledge.

Each platform-specific guide builds on the concepts covered here, applying them to particular tools, APIs, and data formats while following the same fundamental migration philosophy.