Revolutionising database management with database DevOps

Data serves as the fundamental building block in the contemporary landscape of digital enterprises. Within this realm, data empowers IT teams, database experts and organisational leaders to arrive at well-informed choices, heighten operational efficiency and maintain a competitive edge in pursuing business goals. Simultaneously, the seamless functioning of applications relies on data availability, ensuring the prevention of any potential bottlenecks is a top priority.

However, capitalising on the potential of data has grown into a complex endeavour, owing to the evolving intricacies of modern IT environments driven by continuous digital transformation initiatives and the migration to cloud infrastructure. Company data now resides in and is accessed through diverse avenues — existing concurrently within on-premises data centres, private cloud providers and one or more public cloud hyperscalers.

This difficulty is more challenging when organisations support multiple application architectures, such as client-server applications, container-based applications and microservices architectures. Organisations also manage vastly different data classifications, including unstructured, semi-structured and structured data. And these are stored using different database platforms, such as noSQL, non-relational and relational databases, respectively. While this provides great flexibility, it also makes building efficient and highly scalable applications and databases more difficult.

Businesses often need help understanding how to address issues related to databases effectively. The wealth of data available to a business can quickly go from being a great asset to a great risk if poorly managed, secured and governed. Instead of data bringing benefits of reducing problem resolution times, increasing cost efficiency, and improving the end-user and customer experience, it can cause headaches and open the business to risk of breach or abuse.

The complex nature of businesses’ data means companies often struggle to bring performance data into their DevOps framework. Incorporating database management into DevOps practices can help ensure data and applications run efficiently while helping organisations avoid downtime, reduce deployment rollbacks and eliminate system crashes due to database performance issues. However, many businesses overlook the DevOps framework, given the complex nature of managing data.

The challenge with all the various types of data stored in different locations begins with businesses needing more visibility into issues related to their databases. Companies need to see inside the so-called ‘black box’ of the database so they can better integrate data, database schemas and stored procedure code into their DevOps practices to streamline database development and administration through continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), enhance security and reduce the possibility of downtime and system crashes.

In light of these challenges, database observability solutions can serve as an X-ray machine for your database systems, enabling you to finally see inside the black box, understand the root cause of issues, resolve issues faster and proactively optimise poor performance to help prevent future issues. If your databases are under observation, incorporating the database into the DevOps framework becomes much easier.

The benefits can be significant when companies successfully bring databases into their DevOps framework. Here are six of the top benefits organisations can realise by integrating DevOps with databases:

Streamlined deployment and software delivery: Organisations can integrate database development and operations to enable a streamlined and automated approach to software delivery, resulting in teams more easily meeting the needs of the business through faster deployment cycles and delivery of new features and updates.

Increased collaboration across teams: By bringing together developers, operations teams and database administrators, businesses encourage collaboration and communication across different departments, which can lead to better alignment of goals, improved understanding of requirements and more efficient problem-solving.

Improved agility and flexibility: Organisations must respond rapidly to evolving business needs and market demands no matter where they are on their digital transformation journeys. By automating database provisioning, configuration and deployment as they do with their application code, teams can more easily scale their infrastructure, roll out new features and adapt to the evolving needs of the business.

Reduced risk and downtime: By automating and standardising database deployments using CI/CD, organisations can minimise the risk of human errors and reduce the potential for downtime. Database DevOps practices can help ensure changes are thoroughly tested and validated before being deployed, reducing the chances of data loss or service disruptions. Also, if deployment of new database code goes wrong, CI/CD can make it quicker and easier to roll back to the last good version.

Efficient database management: Virtually all applications within an organisation require a database. By implementing DevOps, it provides organisations with a structured approach to managing databases and any data changes through version control — which guards against any uncontrolled changes to the code, structure or configuration of a database — change tracking and easier rollback mechanisms, helping ensure changes can be managed efficiently and safely.

Improved compliance and security: Database DevOps emphasises including security and compliance measures throughout the development lifecycle. By integrating security controls and best practices, organisations can factor in data protection, privacy and regulatory compliance requirements earlier in the process.

Through integrating a database DevOps approach, IT operations, DevOps teams and database administrators can ensure their database infrastructure reaps analogous advantages to those experienced by other DevOps-utilising units. This encompasses the capacity to conduct comprehensive performance analysis of their data and skilfully tackle pressing business intricacies.

By integrating a robust database observability solution with a database DevOps approach, businesses can enhance their database visibility, obtain valuable performance insights and streamline the management and maintenance of even the most intricate database systems. The effective synergy between database observability and DevOps empowers organisations to address the demands of their expanding array of business needs. This collaboration facilitates the creation of resilient database architectures, meets performance expectations and propels triumphant endeavours in digital transformation and modernisation.

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