T-SQL Tuesday #091 – Round-Up

Thank you to everyone who participated in T-SQL Tuesday #091 which was on databases and DevOps. As I anticipated, this brought out quite a bit of variety on the posts. This is because DevOps is still… not quite cooked…(?) in many peoples minds. I think with the range of posts we saw here, it’ll be a lot more clear to those who are just getting an introduction to it. Here are the posts (in no particular order) and a few comments on each:

Databases and DevOps: Rob Farley – I like Rob’s approach to this intro to DevOps. He’s a consultant. It’d sure be nice if you had the protections that DevOps offers in front of your systems before he starts recommending changes.

What Playing at Minecraft has Taught Me About DevOps: Richie Lee – OK, then. This is actually a great overview of getting started with DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery (and yeah, three different things). As with Minecraft, DevOps is all about the fundamentals. Oh, and **COUGH** use ReadyRoll or SQL Source Control **COUGH**.

How/Why/What is DevOps: BlobEater – Second post to mention just how fundamental implementing source control in your databases is to starting the process of automated testing and automated deployments. I couldn’t agree more. Nice story about how they first used DevOps too.

What DevOps Is and Is Not: Andy Yun – Excellent summary of DevOps, especially addressing the fear that many operations people have. No, it’s not about Developers taking over everything. It’s about better communication and process in order to delivery more functionality, faster and safer.

A DevOps Success Store: Chrissy Lemaire – This is a wonderful outline of how you can really do DevOps within databases and have it work well. Further, it’s a chance for you to get involved in DevOps work directly. There’s a real learning opportunity.

Databases and DevOps: David Alcock – Another fundamentals post, but one that goes to real core of DevOps, people. It’s all about building better communication in order to facilitate all the rest. Couldn’t agree more. Also agree with the lack of rap skills.

Book Review, Google’s Site Reliability Engineering: Brent Ozar – Nice post reviewing the book that shows how Google does DevOps. I’m hooked. I’ll have to read this now. Thanks for sharing this one.

Keeping the Database DevOps Overhead Light: Simon Sabin – Finally, some Powershell. Simon gives a great overview of technical methods for keeping the amount of software that you must maintain in support of your DevOps process low.

Buzzword Bingo: Kenneth Fisher – Kenneth focuses on how, and why, DevOps integrations might go wrong. I do agree with his core assessment, doing this because it sounds cool will likely lead to failure.

Start Talking: John Morehouse – YES! YES! YES! This person absolutely gets it. DevOps is about communication and collaboration. Tools and processes and automation, absolutely. It all starts with talking to one another. Wonderful post. Thanks so much John.

Visual Studio and DevOps – I talked about tools just because I so frequently talk about people & process when it comes to DevOps that I thought I’d mix it up a little.

Early DevOps: Steve Jones – I love reading about people doing DevOps before it was DevOps because I have very similar experiences. I also love seeing the common themes that lots and lots of people are exploring, its about the team and the process, the tools come along later.

Databases and DevOps: Ed Elliot – Another person advocating for the importance of people, communication and process over any particular toolset including the need for source control. Not entirely sure I agree with that last bit, but yes, this is the point of DevOps.

Why Data People Don’t Do DevOps: Steph Locke – An interesting premise. Instead of promoting DevOps, let’s promote DataOps, get all the data people excited about the idea and then later reveal, hey, it was DevOps all along. Heck, I’m in if it makes data people feel better. We can call it Fred if it gets people communicating and automating.

Orchestrating SQL Server with Kubernetes: James Anderson – I was just talking with a developer the other day about using containers with SQL Server and here’s a how-to on using containers with SQL Server. Excellent! Implementation of DevOps requires automation and part of that is allowing for the self-service creation of environments. Containers are absolutely one mechanism for solving this issue. Nice to see this laid out so well.

DevOps and Databases – The One Thing You May Be Doing Wrong: Hamish – Only one? Love this though. The focus on culture and communication is vital. He’s dead on accurate. The tools are easy (and yeah, I love his choice of tools), but DevOps is going to fail if you’re not focused on the culture.

DevOps or DataOps, Either Way It’s Coming to SQL Server: Aaron Nelson – Aaron focuses on Powershell (shocking right) to clarify if only we had a couple of extra statements there, one of the fundamental needs of DevOps, automation, would be easier.

And that’s it. Thank you again to everyone who participated. Thank you for reading this far. I hope all this proves useful.