DevOps and Source Control

The topic of DevOps and and Agile are everywhere, but how often do you hear Source Control thrown into the mix?  Not so much in public, but behind the closed doors of technical and development meetings when Agile is in place, it’s a common theme.  When source control isn’t part of the combination, havoc ensues and a lot of DBAs working nights on production with broken hearts.

Control Freaks

So what is source control and why is it such an important part of DevOps?  The official definition of source control is:

Delphix, with it’s ability to provide developer with as many virtual copies of databases, including masked sensitive data, is a no-brainer when ensuring development and then test have the environments to do their jobs properly.  The added features of bookmarking and branching is the impressive part that creates full source control.

Branching and Bookmarks

Using the diagram below, note how easy it is to mark each iteration of development with a bookmark to make it easy to then lock and deliver to test, a consistent image via a virtual database, (VDB.)

• Note the feature branches, but every pull and checkout should be a test of the build, including the data.
• How do we include the data? We connect the source databases (even when the source was multi-terabtytes originally) to Delphix and now we have production data in version control synchronized from all sources
• This is then a single timeline representing all sources from which to develop, branch and test.
• After each subsequent development deployment, a branch is created for test in the form of a VDB.  The VDB’s are all read/write copies, so full testing can be performed, even destructive testing.  It’s simple to reverse a destructive test with Delphix Timeflow.
• After each test succeeds, a merge can be performed or if a problem occurs in the testing, a bookmark can be performed to preserve the use case for closer examination upon delivery of the VDB image to development.
• The Delphix engine can be kept keep the environment sync’d near real-time with production to deter from any surprises that a static physical refresh might create.
• Each refresh only takes a matter of minutes vs. days or weeks with a physical duplicate or refresh process.  VDBs save over 70% on storage space allocation, too.

Delphix is capable of all of this, while implementing Agile data masking to each and every development and test environment to protect all PII and PCI data from production in non-production environments.

Delphix, DevOps and Source Control-  a match made in heaven.