Chapter 8. Release Management
As we automate and ease the burdens of infrastructure management, the database reliability engineer (DBRE) is able to devote more time to the highly valuable parts of their job. One of these high-value activities is working with software engineers to build, test and deploy application features. Traditionally, the database administrator (DBA) would be a gatekeeper to production. They would expect to see each database migration, database object definition, and code accessing the database to ensure that it was done correctly. When satisfied, the DBA would plan an appropriate hand-crafted change and husband it through into production.
You might already be thinking that this is not necessarily a sustainable process for environments experiencing significant amounts of deployments and changes in their database structures. In fact, if youâve been part of one of these processes you are already keenly aware of how quickly a DBA can go from gatekeeper to bottleneck, leading to burnout on the DBA end and frustrations in software engineering.
Our goal in this chapter is to look at how DBREs can effectively utilize their time, skills, and experience to support a software engineering process that utilizes continuous integration (CI) and even continuous deployment (CD) without becoming a bottleneck.
Education and Collaboration
One of the first steps the DBRE must take is educating the developer population about the datastores with which they are working. If the ...
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