Migration Architect
Migration Architect is a skill for planning and executing zero-downtime migrations of databases, services, and infrastructure. It provides tools for generating migration plans, checking compatibility, and creating rollback runbooks, along with patterns and checklists to minimize business impact.
✨ What it does
- Generates phased migration plans with risk assessment and timeline estimates.
- Checks schema and API compatibility, reporting breaking and potentially breaking changes.
- Creates rollback runbooks with data recovery and service rollback procedures.
- Provides migration patterns for database, service, and infrastructure migrations.
- Includes pre-, during, and post-migration checklists and risk mitigation strategies.
- Offers data validation and reconciliation techniques like checksums and delta detection.
🎯 When to use it
- Planning a database migration with schema changes that must avoid downtime.
- Replacing or refactoring a service using patterns like strangler fig or canary deployment.
- Migrating infrastructure between clouds or from on-premises to cloud.
- Any high-risk transition that requires explicit rollback strategies and validation gates.
🚀 How to use
Trigger by asking for migration planning, compatibility checks, or rollback generation. Provide a migration spec JSON (see assets/sample_database_migration.json) and schema files. Run the scripts in sequence: planner, checker, rollback generator. Example prompts:
Plan a zero-downtime migration for our PostgreSQL database using the spec in migration_spec.json.
Check compatibility between the old and new schema files and generate a rollback runbook.
📄 Output: Migration plan JSON, compatibility report JSON, and rollback runbook files.
📦 Add this skill to Claude Code
# 1. Get the skills repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alirezarezvani/claude-skills /tmp/claude-skills
# 2. Copy this skill into your project (or ~/.claude/skills for all projects)
mkdir -p .claude/skills
cp -r /tmp/claude-skills/engineering/skills/migration-architect .claude/skills/migration-architectSkill source: engineering/skills/migration-architect/SKILL.md
⚠️ Good to know
Requires Python 3 and the provided scripts; assumes input files follow the expected JSON structure.
❓ FAQ
What is the approval gate for a migration?
The migration is not approved until the compatibility checker exits 0 (fully compatible) or every breaking/potentially-breaking item is explicitly accepted by the owner in writing, and a rollback runbook exists for every phase.
What patterns are available for service migrations?
The skill covers strangler fig, parallel run, and canary deployment patterns.
How does the skill handle data validation?
It provides strategies like row count validation, checksums/hashing, and business logic validation, plus reconciliation patterns like delta detection.
🤖 Overview, features, install steps and FAQ were generated from the project's SKILL.md on Sep 4, 2026. Always check the original source before running commands.