Databases: An Obstacle to DevOps Progress?

As I wrote in yesterday’s blog, Delphix, (a DBmaestro partner) together with Gleanster Research just published a survey on the state of DevOps. What really jumped out at me was the section of the report titled "The State of Data in DevOps – How data management affects DevOps."  The results of the survey demonstrated that the database is a major obstacle in the way of DevOps success – across the entire application.

The report states that the biggest challenge facing DevOps initiatives among both DevOps Practitioners and Leaders is limited testing environments due to data issues. One-third of Practitioners and nearly half of DevOps Leaders report this as the primary challenge with productivity.

But this inefficiency affected DevOps Leaders disproportionately, with 62% of DevOps Leaders reporting access to full data as a requirement for non-production environments and only 44% of DevOps Practitioners reporting the same.

Today, applications teams are moving faster than the organization can keep up. One-third of all respondents to Delphix’s survey indicated their organization has a difficult time keeping up with the rate of software delivery from teams engaged in DevOps practices.

The report also revealed that DevOps Practitioners are working around data security constraints and taking data environment setup and teardown into their own hands. This would explain why 55% of Practitioners and 79% of Leaders reported Agile Data Management as the most common DevOps practice adopted.

Delivering software faster and more frequently calls for more rapid approaches to quality assurance and release verification. With the increased pace of development and testing, organizations are under pressure to create testing and staging environments that can support frequent testing efforts. This is required to support the sort of agile software delivery practices that often accompany DevOps.

The survey data suggests that companies with a commitment to DevOps are more likely to require full production data for both QA and development activities.