Move a service that is already taking calls
Your short code stays yours. Your aggregator contract stays as it is. Your APIs stay where they are. The only thing that changes is the URL your aggregator calls when someone dials.
What actually changes
One line of configuration at your aggregator. Everything a regulator, a customer or your finance team knows about stays where it is.
| What | Today | After the move |
|---|---|---|
| Your short code | Rented from your aggregator or held with the operator. | The same code, the same rental, the same agreement. |
| Your aggregator | Bills you for the code and the sessions your callers use. | Unchanged. luftflow is billed separately, and you can stop paying us without touching them. |
| Your APIs | Called from your own handler. | Called by the flow, with the same URLs, and stubbed with test answers until you say otherwise. |
| Sessions | Held in memory or a store your handler owns. | Held by the luftflow runtime, hosted by us or on your own network, where a retry is answered from the session's record rather than by calling you twice. |
| The callback URL | Points at your service. | Points at a luftflow environment. Staging and live get their own address, so you can rehearse against a test code first. |
The move, a week at a time
A month, unhurried, with your callers on your old service until the last step.
- Week 1 — rebuild
- Your menu is rebuilt in the editor, screen by screen, and you walk it on the phone in your browser. Nothing of yours is touched.
- Week 1 — tests for the paths you fear
- Every path a caller can take becomes a scenario that has to pass before anything is published, including the ones your team knows are fragile.
- Week 2 — staging
- Your staging environment gets its own callback address, pointed at your aggregator's test code. Dial it from a real handset.
- Week 3 — rehearse the release
- A dry run: publish a version, roll it back, publish it again, so the thing you are buying is something you have already done once.
- Week 4 — switch
- The live callback URL moves on a quiet morning. The old one stays warm for a week.
Where you are coming from
- From Africa's Talking or another aggregator
- Africa's Talking callbacks work today, and so do MTN-style HTTP gateways. Your menu is rebuilt screen by screen, your test code stays pointed at your old service while you build, and the live code moves last.
- From your own callback
- A callback is a web handler, so what you have is a working specification. We rebuild the screens from it and keep your endpoints; the parts you wrote around it — retries, versions, testing, alerts — are what you stop maintaining.
- From an older engine nobody wants to touch
- Flows are converted, and the converter reproduces how the old engine actually ran them rather than what the YAML seems to mean. Where those two differ you get a report of it, which is usually the first honest inventory of the service anyone has had.
Going back is one paste
Your old callback URL is still yours, and nothing at the operator end has moved. Paste it back and the next caller is on your old service again. That is the whole of going back, and it is why the switch is worth trying on a Tuesday morning rather than agonised over for a quarter.
A caller already in a session finishes it wherever they started. Only the next dial follows the URL.
What we need from you
- Whoever owns the callback URL today, on one call.
- Your menu, however you have it — a YAML file, a screenshot, or just the short code for us to dial.
- A test endpoint for the APIs the menu calls, or permission to stub them until you are ready.
- Your aggregator's test short code, if you have one. If not, the built-in phone does the same job.
What is not there yet
Better said now than found in week three.
- SMS is not live yet, so a service that sends messages keeps sending them the way it does now.
- luftflow holds no SOC 2, ISO 27001 or PCI DSS certification. We answer your questionnaire during the pilot.
- Gateways beyond Africa's Talking and MTN-style HTTP are built on request. Tell us which one you are on.
- Two-way SMS keywords and inbound short codes are designed and not built.
Bring us your menu
Tell us what you run and where it hurts. If your menu is live we will rebuild a path of it and send you a link to dial, before you commit to anything.