7 Benefits of DevOps for Database
The old practices of database administration are struggling to keep up with modern applications. As enterprises shift their workloads from on-premise data centers to the cloud, it’s become increasingly difficult to manage the complex network of technologies that support an enterprise application.
Traditional database practices were not designed for high-velocity development and continuous integration (CI/CD) pipelines; as a result, organizations that haven’t adopted DevOps best practices for database management struggle to deliver new features and fixes into production.
The good news is that you can use DevOps for Database to address those challenges head-on and help your organization deliver higher quality software faster.
In this blog post, we’ll explore 7 benefits of DBDevOps and show you how they can improve the speed and quality of your database deployments.
1. The speed of database deployment
You can improve the speed of database deployment by using a robust tool that facilitates automation of all the tasks involved. This will drastically reduce your time spent on manual work and allow you to focus on more important things.
On average, it takes about 4–6 hours to deploy a new database in an organization that doesn’t use DevOps methodologies. When adopting DevOps, this process is reduced by half. However, this reduction depends on various factors such as complexity of the deployment itself and procedures followed during it (which is why we recommend implementing only best practices).
Having said that, under optimal conditions with a well-defined process in place and tools such as Datical DB Deployment Manager at hand (more information here), we’ve seen companies complete deployments within 30 minutes!
2. Shorter iterations
- Shorter iterations
When you have a DevOps team, your database is deployed in smaller units. This means that the feedback loop is much shorter, which means fewer bugs and issues that need to be fixed. It also means the developers can get their code out there faster and start receiving feedback on it sooner. This leads to faster development, fewer problems with deployments and more time spent creating new features or building out existing ones.
- Faster code deployment
With shorter development cycles comes faster deployment times as well! With short iterations and frequent releases, it’s important not only for your application to be able to deploy quickly but also all its dependencies (including databases).
3. The ability to develop a more stable software
By integrating DevOps into your database development process, you can expect to see less downtime because of bugs. This benefit is especially useful for any company that has a high-traffic website or application.
For example, if your company’s website has a bug that causes it to crash every time someone visits the homepage (and this happens even after multiple people have attempted to fix it), then this could cost your company thousands or even millions of dollars in lost revenue.
When using DevOps processes like automated testing and code review, along with continuous delivery methods such as Docker containers and microservices architecture, companies can decrease their maintenance costs by reducing bugs in their codebase.
4. Higher security standards
Database security is a top priority in the DevOps world, and for good reason. The lack of clear guidelines when it comes to database security can leave companies open to potential data breaches or other attacks that could lead to serious consequences.
DevOps can help address these concerns by implementing stronger encryption protocols, as well as automating the process of securing databases — meaning that your organization doesn’t have to worry about missing out on those important updates.
5. Improvement of the quality of the software
DevOps can help improve the quality of the software by improving its reliability, stability, security and efficiency.
The improvement in quality is a result of the following:
- Using testing practices like Continuous Integration, continuous deployment and continuous delivery.
- Reduction in manual testing errors by automating tests using tools like Selenium IDE and Selenium WebDriver.
6. Improved collaboration between teams
One of the biggest benefits of DevOps for databases is improved collaboration between teams. As an example, let’s say you have a development team that is responsible for creating new features in your application and a database team that maintains the data used by these features.
Traditionally, these two teams would communicate through either email or an issue tracker such as Jira or Confluence. In a DevOps environment, however, they can collaborate directly from their respective applications via chat in Slack or Hipchat.
Another benefit of this increased collaboration is that it helps reduce mistakes caused by miscommunication between departments: if both teams are working on the same project and are able to share information freely across their respective apps (rather than sending messages back and forth through different tools), then any misunderstandings or confusion should be easier to identify before too much work has been done on them — and thus less likely to cause problems later down the road due simply because something wasn’t understood correctly at first glance.”
7. Efficient Processes and DBA Workloads
- Database DevOps is about automating the deployment of databases.
- DevOps for database is the process of automating, configuring and deploying databases.
- It’s about making sure that the development and operation teams are working together smoothly.
The goal of DevOps is to keep everyone in sync so they can deliver faster.
Conclusion
DevOps is a promising and practical approach to DB management. The DevOps approach will be beneficial for you as it can help improve your database’s performance, increase your DBA workloads, and reduce the development time of your database.
It also reduces costs associated with database management by automating processes and reducing the number of mistakes made by human error.
In addition, this method increases security standards because all tasks are automated so there is less chance for malicious code injections or data leaks from poor coding practices