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PATTERN Cited by 1 source

Migrate largest customer first

Migrate the most complex, highest-volume consumer first to build confidence early and compress the remaining migration timeline.

Context

You're migrating a platform to a new backend and have multiple tenants/customers of varying complexity. Conventional wisdom says start with the simplest.

Solution

Invert the order: migrate the largest and most complex customer first. If the new system handles the hardest case, all subsequent migrations are lower risk. This front-loads risk discovery and builds organizational confidence, compressing the tail of the migration.

At Netflix

Netflix decided early to migrate their largest and most complex CMB customer to Netflix Batch (Kueue) first. This allowed them to build confidence that remaining customers could migrate without issues, and resulted in the full production migration lasting only 4 weeks.

(Source: sources/2026-06-22-netflix-how-netflix-simplified-batch-compute-with-kueue)

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