Migrating a Lightning Node: Zero-Downtime Surgery

The Context

At Strike, we needed to migrate our primary Lightning node. This wasn't a dev environment. It was a production system handling real money with real uptime requirements.

The challenge: move terabytes of channel state without losing a single satoshi or dropping a single payment.

Why This Matters

State management in distributed systems is the only problem that matters. This migration taught me more about operational resilience than any architecture diagram ever could.

The post walks through our exact methodology - the tooling we built, the edge cases we discovered, and the one moment where everything almost went wrong.