Data: The Real Guest of Honor in DevOps

Let's face it, data was not invited to the DevOps party. DevOps has tackled accelerating infrastructure, monitoring, and code development; but data has generally been left out of the mix. On June 1st, I had the privilege to conduct a joint webinar, hosted by DevOps.com, with Datical CTO Robert Reeves and former bank VP Jamie Pope, on the closing this "data gap" in DevOps.

Both Datical and Delphix believe that not only should data be invited to the party, but that it deserves to be a guest of honor. After all, isn't everyone else on the DevOps guest list really there to celebrate data? The applications we develop merely serve as storefronts for the exchange of data, to either collect or dispense information. The infrastructure we provision provides the home for our data and storefront, as well as the resources meant to operationalize the data. And monitoring is their to ensure that our data highway is fully operational and free of impediments.

So why has data been left off the guest list? Because data is hard. Data is heavy. That is, until now. Both Delphix and Datical have been independently helping usher data into the 21st century by seamlessly bringing data into our customers' DevOps toolchains. And over the last few years, many of our customers have been coming to us and telling us about how they leverage our two products together to close the gap in their toolchain.

And, the results of using our products together are undeniable.

In short, Delphix does its part in closing the data gap by bringing version control to data and making data weightless. With Delphix, the size, complexity, and security of data is no longer an excuse. Does a developer or tester need a masked copy of your 80TB MSSQL production database from last Tuesday at noon? Not a problem, we have a customer that leverages Delphix to deliver this in 10 minutes, ready to use.

And Datical brings you the ability to treat data object changes as code. Datical can automatically capture, codify, version control, audit, and deploy changes to your database. You can feed your database scripts to Datical, or Datical can do a diff either between a "before and after" state or between two different databases. Datical will package up those changes into deployable packages. This unique capability allows you to take the guess work out of database changes and eliminate the possibility of human misconfiguration.

Combine these two together, and it is like the wonderful bliss that can only be described as "chocolate and peanut butter." Delphix and Datical allow you to take your automated testing to a whole new level. We have customers that have implemented our products into their CI/CD pipeline to run 100X more tests with full fresh data sets and applying schema changes along with their code deployments in minutes. This has dramatically increased application quality and practically eliminated data-related defects. We also have customers that have integrated us into their development activities with tremendous benefit as their developers can now focus on writing application code as opposed to being plagued with all the data-related tasks and related misconfiguration issues that we are all very familiar with.

Closing the data gap is not just what we do, but it is our joint passion. We both boast a very happy customer base and we have a deep sense of pride in that fact. It was a joy and a lot of fun to do the webinar with Datical. Many thanks to DevOps.com for hosting and for all of those who attended. If you missed the webinar and would like to watch it, just follow the link below.

Link to "Plugging the DevOps Data Gap Webinar"