I’ve written a new 65-page ebook, titled DevOps for the Database. Drawn from what I’ve observed over the last 15 or so years in my own experience as well as that of many others, it tries to answer why and how some organizations deliver value to customers fast, run data-intensive applications with high quality, and have great engineering cultures—and why some don’t.
My conclusions?
- It’s a combination of things, not a single difference. Different answers are appropriate for different teams.
- I identify about a dozen key capabilities and organize them into levels of difficulty/progression.
- DevOps needs to be more than just automation. Team structure matters a lot.
- Specialized roles are great if they support software delivery teams; bad if they’re a gatekeeping function along the delivery pipeline.
There are a lot of specific examples, much of it drawn from the MySQL and PostgreSQL communities that I’ve spent so much time in and are so dear to me, but there’s also a lot of examples from Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle environments. As a result, I think the book is pretty database-agnostic and technology-agnostic.
I’ve taken a significant amount of time to go well beyond just describing what I’ve observed in various teams. I didn’t stop at saying “high performing teams do X and Y.” I dug pretty deeply into how they do those things.
Want to know how to completely automate schema migrations at scale, in an environment similar to yours? Want to know how that’s different from, say, someone using a different database technology? There’s either material directly in the book, or synopses of reference material to study in depth.
There’s actually a lot more, and I hope you’ll find the time to read it (and give me feedback on it). It’s a free PDF download, gated behind a form on VividCortex’s website. Happy reading!
