What has Devops to do with DBA?

DBA the database administrator is an essentially important personnel in infrastructure team. In larger enterprises like IBM, Oracle, Google DBA is a separate group in itself. Devops has been the talk of the town this year. Devops is a culture that did start gaining momentum ever since 2014. In this post lets see what is the scope of Devops for a DBA. As such what does a DBA do in Devops team Organizations create a brand new Devops engineer profile and much of them talk about knowledge of linux, ability to work comfortably in linux systems etc. System administrators find easy transition onto Devops space. That doesn't stop there. Every member in infrastructure has some role major or minor when become part of Devops. So, what is expected out of a DBA who is to join Devops team in real-time? 1) Cloud infrastructure knowledge - Datacentre has started moving out of your office space onto cloud ever since amazon launched AWS service in 2006. Though it was thought out to be a service to cater internet based companies like google, facebook etc organizations started realizing the pay as you go model value and are migrating their infrastructure onto cloud. Say, you are a DBA for a brand new project and you have been asked to come up with capacity planning - Once you come up with proposal on disk space, anticipated growth in next 5 years now firms ask you to migrate your database onto cloud services like AWS, Rackspace etc. DBA's will have to work with AWS engineers in case you want to go with Amazon service, migrate your database onto AWS using their GUI tools, make sure performance is perfect. If you find some issues, have them add more CPU's, disk, memory etc resources on the go. Biggest advantage is that you only pay as you use the resources. You don't have to lock the money in servers costing 1000's of dollars as you did before Take away : DBA's should learn basics of AWS to support databases in cloud. You will be hired as part of Devops team if you know cloud computing infrastructure like AWS, rackspace, openstack etc. Recently Oracle has come up with Oracle Cloud that offers database as a service DaaS. Once migrated DBA's should evangelize this to Devops team 2) Database Install/Upgrades/Migration scripts update - When the culture does get transformed from waterfall onto Devops adopting Lean agile methodologies, DBA's who work in development will need to checkin the code changes, add new scripts that come as part of product install, upgrade, migration scripts onto source code system, will need to check automated email notification from continuous integration and delivery frameworks like jenkins, make changes, support until code in deployed in pre-production environment 3) Knowledge of Devops infrastructure, tools - When you adapt to a particular culture you start learning tools, techniques, processes that does support it. This is no different. DBA's should know something about the following tools that are integral part of Devops framework Linux shell scripting - It can be bash,ksh,csh,bash etc Source control tools - git, svn, clearcase and can be any choice of your organization. This is wherein you checkin code Build & release engineering tool - ant, apache maven Continuous integration and continuous delivery - CI&CD tools can be jenkins, hudson etc Jira, docker, chef, puppet - some understanding on this will come handy