‘Twas the Night Before Migration'

This is a light-hearted tribute to IT professionals and the hard work they execute for digital transformations. With apologies to Clement Clark Moore, we based it on his classic poem originally titled “A Visit from St. Nicholas” and now better known as “’ Twas the Night Before Christmas.” We hope you enjoy it, and happy holidays to all!

’Twas the night ’fore migration, when all thro’ the net,
Not a packet was slowed, nor one dropped yet;
The apps were loaded in the cloud with care,
In the hopes that smooth services soon would be there;

The users were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of AI apps danced in their heads,
And engineers in operations, and I at my laptop,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s wrap-up,
 
When out in the network there arose such a spike,
I sprang to my desk to see what caused the hike.
Away to the login, I typed like a flash,
Tore open our observability app and pulled up the dash.

New migrated traffic passed smoothly, I saw, 
Gave hope for the new day of happy customers’ awe,
When what did my wondering eyes then envision,
But millions of packets, and many critical transactions,

With a swift WAN connection, so lively and fine,
I knew our users were active online.
More rapid than gigabits their messages came,
And they wrote and sent them, addressed them by name;

“Now Sales! Now Marketing! Now Receivables and Payables!
“On HR! On Finance! On Manufacturing and Shipping!
“To the back of the delivery truck, to the customer accounts!
“Now ship away! Ship away! Ship away all!”

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So up to the network the apps how they flew,
With the packets full of data and quality experience too.

And then in a twinkling, I saw some screen action;
The sending and receiving of each little transaction.
As I drew in my eyes, for a much closer sight
Out passed the results of our global team’s night.

With interactions in order from logins to logouts,
And messages perfect, no jitter or fragments,
A bundle of sales orders transferred safely from afar,
And it looked like success was nearly in store.

Network engineers, how they twinkled! Their excitement how merry!
Execs were like roses, their delight like a cherry!
The new network operated like a well-orchestrated show,
And the help desk was quiet as new-fallen snow;

The network architect sat back from his screen,
And the light it enveloped his face like a wreath;
A wink of his eye and a turn of his head,
Soon gave us to know we had nothing to dread;

IT spoke not a word—had gone straight to their work,
Set up the servers and configured the apps.
And laying their legacy tools by their desks,
They shared new performance reports with the rest.

The cloud director sprang to his car, to his IT team gave a whistle,
And away they all drove, like the down of a thistle.
But I heard them exclaim, ere they drove out of sight,
Happy networking to all, and to all a good night!