Migrating chat made easy with Sync Server

Part of the challenge of migrating from one chat provider to another is not having a live migration solution ready. Building a live migration solution can be costly in terms of time and resources. Even during migration there is a cost in terms of maintaining and monitoring the migration process, all the while paying for multiple chat providers. Even more costly is an unsuccessful migration due to a lack of in-house expertise with chat migration.

Layer’s impending shutdown in October means that time is of the essence to move to another chat service provider. Sendbird offers a managed service which offers to migrate existing Layer customers to Sendbird’s platform. This includes both the historical and live migration components which results in a quick and seamless process without disrupting your existing chat service. Our experience with Layer migrations will ensure that your users will be able to migrate as soon as possible and with as little impact to their experience as possible.

Live Update with Sync Server

The Sendbird Sync Server is a service that supports live migration of customer data from Layer to Sendbird. It is fully managed meaning that you do not need to worry about hosting or monitoring server infrastructure. By letting Sendbird handle the migration your teams can keep their focus on the core product.

Live migration speed is dependent on how quickly your mobile clients can switch over to Sendbird, however this should not mean that the experience of your users on the Layer SDK should be affected negatively as a result. Our service syncs new information back to the Layer platform so that user experience is preserved throughout the migration process regardless of which chat provider your users are using.

Migration of Historical Data

Once the live update is set up and running, Sendbird’s support team migrates data from Layer servers to Sendbird servers. We take care of data transformation from Layer’s format to Sendbird’s format, and for extra protection for transfer of large data sets, we provide a SFTP server with SSH access so that the data transfer process is transparent.

Service Guarantees

• Backfill migration of historical messages
• Real time processing and delivery of webhook to corresponding API call
• Sendbird will cover monitoring and operation of the sync server infrastructure
• Best effort real-time synchronization of messages, channels and users between Layer and Sendbird
• File storage on Sendbird servers for file messages to remain accessible after Layer shutdown

Migration Journey

The journey to migrate chat from Layer to Sendbird involves the following steps:

• Customer creates Sendbird application
• Customer generates Layer export data
• Sendbird turns on Sync Server
• Sendbird transforms data performs historical backfill migration
• Updated application using Sendbird is released
• Users migrate onto updated version of application, migration concludes

The estimated completion time for migration can vary. Still, in the ideal case, our estimate of the total amount is around one month to perform backfill migration and begin migration on the sync server. Time of completion of migration will depend on the business application’s mobile adoption rate and how fast users can upgrade to the version with Sendbird Chat.

We hope you find our migration services beneficial as you evaluate options to migrate your chat service from Layer.