Enabling migration of code in a service oriented architecture executed in a distributed computing environment. A migration definition for generating migrations is received, the migration definition exposing a tangible set of matchers and filters configured to locate code constructs and codebase settings of the code to be migrated. The code to be migrated is user defined. A deterministic script is scaffolded from the tangible set of matchers and filters to find instances of code to update or settings to update within the distributed environment. The instances of the code settings are updated, whereby the code in the service oriented architecture is migrated.