This page stays with details I can share and verify. I’ll add the fuller decisions, collaboration and lessons once I have written them from my own experience.
Some implementation details and internal programme terminology have been intentionally omitted or generalised.
The work
Swisscom’s next-generation virtual routing platform represented more than a software release. It required a new platform to become production-ready while migration tooling, operational processes, network dependencies and customer cutovers moved with it.
I took over delivery work during the platform’s later development stage and helped bring the remaining work into production. I have continued contributing to the platform’s technical and operational improvement as migration activity progressed.
Why it was difficult
The programme moved enterprise customers from a legacy virtual routing environment towards a next-generation architecture using vMSR. The transition crossed software engineering, network engineering, orchestration, infrastructure, operations, product, migration teams, business stakeholders and external technology vendors.
With that many moving parts, a safe migration depended on the whole system being ready—not just each component working on its own.
Where I helped
I worked across both the engineering details and the coordination needed to bring them together. That included:
- bringing the remaining platform work towards production;
- working through technical dependencies and escalations;
- supporting migration planning and production readiness;
- contributing to cutover support and production troubleshooting;
- improving migration tooling and automation;
- feeding what we learned during migrations back into the platform.
I did not formally manage the teams involved. My contribution was to help create the technical clarity and coordination required for work to converge across disciplines.
Making migrations safe at scale
The migration programme spanned more than 1,500 enterprise customers. Migration activity had to account for customer impact, platform capacity, network readiness, orchestration state, operational support and the ability to diagnose problems across system boundaries.
The delivery model also needed to handle substantial parallel activity. That increased the importance of reproducible tooling, controlled rollout, clear dependencies and production feedback.
Improving the migration tool
Alongside the routing platform, I worked on the ongoing development and improvement of a business-critical migration tool. That included simplifying deployment and setup, maintaining production code and environments, improving engineering workflows, and supporting customer migration execution.
Those improvements contributed to an approximately 40% cost reduction. The figure is presented as an observed programme metric; no additional methodology is inferred here.
Reducing disruption in testing
I contributed to validated live-migration testing that reduced customer disruption from approximately 4–5 minutes to 10–15 seconds under the tested configuration.
This result applies to the validated test conditions. It should not be interpreted as a universal outcome for every production migration.