Voice of the DBA

Tag: DevOps

  • Product Platform Teams

    Is infrastructure a product? Should an Ops team start to feel like they are a team involved in building things rather than maintaining them? It’s an interesting idea that is put forth in this blog from Forrester. The piece postulates that the Ops group should be thinking like a product team, just like developers working on an application.

    When a development group moves to a DevOps style of building things, and starts to take some responsibility for the support of their work, what does the Ops group do? If we push infrastructure as code into our VCS, is there much for the Ops group to do?

    I’d argue there still is. From the DBA side, operational staff can help determine what infrastructure is needed, or what changes need to be made. It’s easy to say that devs should add RAM or CPUs, or even another replica, but do they really know when to add them? Or do they just scale everything up? The latter might be easy on people used to writing code, but it’s not necessarily a good idea for the organizational budget.

    Ops staff can still tune systems, add indexes and rewrite code, and give feedback and knowledge to developers to help them understand how to write better code, or infra-as-code code, the first time. There’s also the need to practice and be ready for various DR situations, including the “whoops, I deleted some data”. There are skills that help handle these situations, which are far different from developer skills.

    This is in addition to designing new systems and setting templates for that infrastructure as code that the developers keep in their VCS. There’s also the need to build self-service tools, which might be where Ops becomes a product team. I think that will be necessary, as tooling is important everywhere. I think Operations might even develop other things, like reports requirements that developers don’t have time to build. Ultimately, though, there is still a need for some Ops work, albeit work that ought to be closely aligned, and shared, with developers.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Take the 2020 State of Database DevOps survey

    It’s still 2019, but we’re looking forward to 2020 and wonder how your world has changed since our survey last year. There are a number of questions and this will probably take 20 minutes to complete, but you have a couple incentives:

    • Completed surveys donate $1 to UNICEF
    • You could win a 64GB iPod Air

    You can take the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/FWCVCBJ

    Feel free to pass this along to your friends as well.

  • The Redgate Way

    Recently Matt Hilbert, from Redgate Software, wrote a piece on our blog about our journey to DevOps. It’s a great read, summing up some of the things that we’ve learned in our journey across the last decade. Matt is a great writer, and it’s worth a few minutes of your time to check it out and think about all the things that we’ve been through.

    I’ve known some people at Redgate for 18+ years, and I’ve worked there for 12, so I’ve had the chance to see quite a few changes. When I started, teams worked for long periods of times, in what is really a waterfall methodology. They went through substantial phases of development, testing, and beta releases, with Brad McGehee and myself having plenty of time to learn a product and then know it would be stable for a year or so.

    That slowly started to change, as Matt describes, with teams moving to new methods of building software, experimenting and learning. The Prompt team was one of the most ambitious, working in pair programming and finding ways to release almost on demand. Over time, other teams caught up and built some amazing processes. We even had two teams working on some products, with alternating two week sprint cycles to allow them to release every week. That was an impressive coordination of software development teams.

    Even today, I’m constantly impressed by teams. They aren’t all always rock stars, but they often exceed my expectations. I will see some slowdowns when teams change their people, process, or tooling, but then they will leap forward. The Data Masker team has been impressive lately, with some fantastic productivity improvements being added to the software. I apologized recently for not taking the Data Catalog team seriously for almost a year, but they have done more than I ever imagined with that tool in the last six months.

    We do continue to improve our software development skills at Redgate. We do release often, but really, we try to also improve the quality of our software, improve the skills of our developers, while working to retain talented individuals and help them enjoy their chosen career. We still produce bugs, we never get everything done as fast as sales, marketing, or even me, would like, but I do think that the last ten years has been an incredible growth as set of software development teams. Now our challenge is more closely aligning all teams to work in a loosely coupled, but tightly integrated fashion.

    DevOps is really a better way to build software for most organizations and teams. It often doesn’t change a lot about the actual code we write, but it does get developers, infrastructure staff, and management to rethink how we work, especially how we work together. That’s the hardest part to get through to many customers. This isn’t an install-a-tool-and-things-are-great system. Tools do help, but your attitude, your focus, and your willingness to work as a team are more important.

    Read about our journey. We’ve taken 1,000 steps, but there is more for us to learn, change, and implement as we move forward. Think about how you would want to change things at your company, and maybe pass this along to your manager. It’s not easy, and it might not be quick, but it’s an incredible journey. It’s also very much worth the time and effort you put into it.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • A Mindset Shift

    I’ve been working with people at Microsoft for nearly two decades in different circumstances. It’s been interesting to me to work with developers, Microsoft consultants, and community people across the lifetime of SQLServerCentral, especially the last 5 years. For a long time, I never wanted to work there, but I’ve started to think I might find it to be an interesting company in the last couple years.

    There are two good articles that talk about the ways that Microsoft has changed. The first is from the high level culture perspective and tries to explain how the mindset has changed. If I hadn’t been witness to it, I wouldn’t believe it. These changes really happened, and they were amazing to me. I’ve been going to Redmond for 15 years, often working with a couple groups and since Satya Nadella took over, I’ve seen these changes get implemented. I’ve watched teams grow and change, and learn to re-frame the way they look at their work. I think it’s been a change for the better.

    The second one is a little more technically detailed, and perhaps more interesting to anyone that would like to get their organization to adopt DevOps. There are some specifics with tools, but really read about the mindset changes and the feedback they use to improve software. I think too many managers think automation and features are all you need to implement and forget that quality, experimentation and learning are keys to this working well. Make sure you point those out to managers if you pass this along.

    Not everyone at Microsoft made the transition. Some left, some were probably asked to leave. New people came, but plenty adapted, altered their mindset, and have bought into the way that the company has evolved. They’ve certainly gone from a company I wouldn’t want to work for because of the stacked ranking and competition to an organization I’d now consider employment within. That’s if they want someone remote in Denver.

    I’m proud that Redgate is also moving in this type of direction. We’ve learned a lot from DevOp and we’re learning that culture is important. We hire those that work well with us and help us build better tools for software developers in a team culture. Those that don’t want to work with a team, work in a DevOps flow, and be accountable for their autonomy will probably move on. That’s fine. We’re learning who we are and implementing that into our staff. I’ve tried to do the same in my life, know who I am and be that. I hope you can do the same.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.