QnA Maker WebApp Migration Story

Daniel Weissenborn 1 Reputation point
2020-02-26T16:11:17.583+00:00

This may be something more appropriate for Cognitive Services Group, but I will post it here just in case.

I have a QNA Maker instance in Azure that is providing backing services for an application. This application has come under ownership of another group within the organization, and thus needs to move to another Azure subscription under the governance of that group.

I've seen this article on migrating QNA Maker knowledge bases. This method won't work for two reasons: 

It's a manual process  
It doesn't actually "migrate" anything -- it generates new knowledgebases and imports the question/answer data. That's not going to fly, as the application backed by QNA Maker relies on the KB IDs.

I found this application that copies the search indexes to another search service, and it works perfectly. Except it does not create KBs in the QNA Maker instance, which renders the data effectively useless. It's copied over, ready to use, but the QNA Maker isn't aware of its existence and can't use it.

I grabbed the QNA Maker runtime assemblies and popped them open in ILSpy, but as far as I can tell, the "Cognitive Services" resource hosting the QNA Maker has its own internal, inaccessible data store that manages metadata tying KBs to search indexes.

This puts me in a position where I'm at a loss. Is there any mechanism by which the actual KB metadata from a QNA Maker instance can be copied to another instance of QNA Maker? There doesn't seem to be anything in the public APIs as documented by Microsoft.

All I want to do is take a backup of the QNA Maker instance and restore it to another instance. KB IDs can't change, because those are used as keys by downstream consuming applications.

Azure App Service
Azure App Service
Azure App Service is a service used to create and deploy scalable, mission-critical web apps.
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  1. brtrach-MSFT 15,256 Reputation points Microsoft Employee
    2020-02-27T18:36:26.887+00:00

    @Daniel Weissenborn , yes this does appear to be more related to the cognitive services side rather than the web app that it's hosted on. For now, we kindly request you to ask your question here, where we have cognitive service experts who can best assist you.

    If the discussion uncovers that the underlying web app is needed to assist with the migration, please come back here and we can assist further from that side of things.

    We'll leave this question open in case anyone from the community has further thoughts. Thank you for your understanding.

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