If you’ve reached this page, you’re probably frustrated with the slow and manual process of releasing databases. This can be a major roadblock in an otherwise automated and fast software development life cycle (SDLC), hindering speed, innovation, and overall progress. In this article, we will explore ways to improve the database release workflow, including removing it as a productivity bottleneck, enabling faster and higher-quality software releases, freeing up database administrators for more valuable projects, and improving customer trust through security and reliability. Database DevOps is the solution to the problem faced by many organizations, as it seeks to accelerate database deployments, which are often a consistent bottleneck in the SDLC. Database DevOps integrates DevOps principles into database change management, completing the final step of the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. This involves a shift in collaboration culture and the adoption of database DevOps tools that provide automation, governance, and observability. By understanding the origins of DevOps, we can effectively apply its principles to database development teams, enhancing collaboration, speed, productivity, and reliability. The collaboration between Dev and Ops teams is crucial to overcome the challenges faced in the SDLC. Development teams focus on meeting user demands and rapidly changing competition through software updates, while operations teams prioritize stable, reliable, auditable, and secure customer services. These opposing priorities can create inefficiencies and conflicts in the workflow, hindering progress. To address these issues, DevOps principles can be applied to database change management. The operations team faces challenges in maintaining smooth app and infrastructure operations, often due to complexity, poor documentation, technical debt, and suboptimal workarounds. Leadership must ensure auditability and efficiency, but these issues often get deprioritized for user-centric or revenue-driving initiatives. On the other hand, development teams face pressure to deliver features quickly and meet release dates, often resulting in technical debt. As technical debt accumulates, overall productivity and quality suffer, and communication and coordination become slower. To overcome these challenges, a DevOps culture that merges Dev and Ops is necessary. DevOps promotes efficiency and quality throughout the delivery process, emphasizing shared responsibility and collaboration. CI/CD pipelines play a crucial role in increasing speed and reliability by integrating code changes into a shared repository and automating their deployment. DevOps practices involve all stakeholders, including platform and infrastructure engineering, security, compliance, governance, risk management, and end-users, to achieve optimal results. However, applying DevOps practices only to the code leaves a manual bottleneck in the process: database updates. Database DevOps addresses this issue by incorporating infrastructure as code, using code-based scripts or templates to provision and manage database infrastructure. This solves the inefficiencies in database update workflows that slow down the SDLC. Manual database change management leads to slow releases, errors, security and compliance risks, and difficulty in investigations and audits. By adopting Database DevOps, organizations can overcome these challenges and achieve faster, more efficient, and more reliable database releases.
