Industrialize migration delivery

An accelerator becomes a delivery system when another trained team can reproduce its outputs, controls, and evidence without relying on the original builders. Airlift industrializes the method in six layers.

1. Qualify before estimating

Record exact source variant, authority, network shape, representative-data approval, scope surfaces, exclusions, recovery objectives, and decision owners. Run authenticated preflights for source metadata, target access, artifact storage, validation, release reconciliation, and evidence signing. Re-baseline delivery after the accepted inventory; do not sell an object count guessed from discovery calls.

2. Bound every provider

For each source adapter and execution provider, define concurrency, rate, quota, cost, timeout, retryable errors, checkpoints, reconciliation, and circuit breaking. A non-idempotent external effect gets one attempt. On timeout, observe external state and reconcile; do not infer failure and retry.

3. Generate one consistent evidence chain

Qualification, assessment, blueprint, waves, human residue, certificates, runbooks, and value reports derive from product contracts. Each output records immutable refs and digests. The delivery team can add narrative, but it cannot rewrite source scope, provider verdicts, readiness, or certificate claims.

4. Rehearse operations

Before the project depends on the installation, rehearse:

• backup and restore;
• evidence-signer rotation;
• connector and credential-reference rotation;
• evidence retention and export;
• disaster recovery;
• application and package upgrade/rollback; and
• workspace/private-link/offline dependency paths.

Radar observations and Tower work remain foreign references. Airlift may block on them; it does not copy their specialty truth.

5. Prove the scale you claim

Repository scale probes cover contract compilation at 10,000 and 50,000 objects. That is not a claim about source API throughput, Lakebase event hydration, validation runtime, or production cutover. Certify those boundaries separately with the project network, provider quotas, dataset, event fan-out, and workspace topology.

6. Separate engagement value from external claims

Engagement reports can describe an admitted project scope. Aggregate external language needs a versioned cohort, comparable manual and assisted scopes, minimum sample and engagement counts, confidence, methods, release generation, exclusions, limitations, methodology review, and immutable evidence.

Use delivery commands in CI and measure engagement value for governed observations and reports.