Data DevOps: An Overview

Data, the way that we process it and store it, is one of many important aspects of IT. Data is the lifeblood of our organizations, supporting real-time business processes and decision-making. For our DevOps strategy to be truly effective we must be able to safely and quickly evolve production databases, just as we safely and quickly evolve production code. Yet for many organizations their data sources prove to be less than trustworthy and their data-oriented development efforts little more than productivity sinkholes. We can, and must, do better. This presentation begins with a collection of agile principles for data professionals and of data principles for agile developers - the first step in working together is to understand and appreciate the priorities and strengths of the people that we work with. Our focus is on a collection of practices that enable development teams to easily and safely evolve and deploy databases. These techniques include agile data modeling, database refactoring, database regression testing, continuous database integration, and continuous database deployment. We also work through operational strategies required of production databases to support your DevOps strategy. If data sources aren’t an explicit part of your DevOps strategy then you’re not really doing DevOps, are you?