Taking care of our databases may be challenging in today’s world. Things can be very complex and complicated, we may be working with hundreds of clusters and applications, and we may lack clear ownership. Navigating this complexity may be even harder when we lack clear guidance on how to tackle particular problems or when our processes are not automated and require manual work and communication.
In today’s world, it’s even more important for platform engineers and engineering leaders to push ownership of databases to the left and make developers own their databases. The organization needs to automate as much as possible and minimize communication between teams. While we achieved many improvements in the DevOps area and even included other aspects in the same way like security (with DevSecOps), configurations (with GitOps), or machine learning (with MLOps), we still keep databases out of the loop. Let’s see why that is a problem and why we should make developers own their databases.
You Limit Your Developers by Letting Them to Do Less
We may face many problems around databases. Most of them are caused by developers not being able to do work efficiently because they don’t own it or they don’t have tools and processes that would unleash their potential. Let’s see why.
Things can break around databases during development. ORMs may generate inefficient queries, we may face N+1 queries problems and send more statements to the database than needed, or we may even refactor our code to increase readability and break the performance accidentally.
Unfortunately, our tools and processes do not capture these issues. We focus on the correctness of the data, we check if we read and write correct entities. However, we don’t check if we use proper indexes, if our schema migrations are fast enough, or how our configuration evolves. We use small databases in our test suits, and we don’t check how things will behave in production. Even if we use load tests, they are very late in the pipeline, are very slow and expensive, and that makes them slow our developers significantly.
Stop making your developers fly blind
When something pops up in production, developers often can’t access the database or don’t know how to investigate. They need to reach out to DBAs and other teams to access logs and understand what else was executing on the database, or what exactly breaks. Monitoring doesn’t help as it swamps developers with generic metrics instead of giving database-oriented analysis and solutions.
Monitoring is not enough. You need observability!
Last but not least, when developers don’t own their databases, they need to reach out to others for help. This is slow, inefficient, and can’t be automated. Developers should be able to self-serve their issues. Developers need to own database reliability end-to-end.
Recommended reading: Observability vs Monitoring - Key Differences & How They Pair
Communication slows you down. Make developers self-serve their issues!
There is a way to fix all these issues. You need to make your developers own their databases and provide them with database guardrails. Let’s see how Metis enables you to achieve that.
Make Developers Own Their Databases
Database guardrails provided by Metis let developers own their databases. Metis enables developers to verify if their changes are safe to be deployed to production. This is achieved by integrating with programming flow and CI/CD pipelines to automatically check queries, schema migrations, and how the applications interact with databases. This gives developers automated checks of all the queries and a clear sign if it’s safe to deploy or not.
Metis truly understands how the database works. This way, Metis helps developers achieve database reliability by providing database-oriented metrics around transactions, caches, index usage, extensions, buffers, and all other things that show the performance of the database.
Metis makes developers work less by diving deep into database-related events like rollbacks, disk spills, or unused indexes. This way, developers don’t need deep knowledge of the system to debug it efficiently. They are not overloaded with infrastructure metrics that show that your CPU usage spiked but don’t explain why it happened.
Developers can self-service their maintenance tasks. Metis analyzes live queries and gives insights into how things behave over time, why they are slow, and how to improve performance. All of that is in real-time for the queries that come to your database.
Metis cuts communication and makes developers work within their team only. Most of the issues can be fixed automatically. For issues that can’t be solved this way, Metis integrates with communication platforms and tells you what is needed and how to do it. Developers don’t need to tune the alerts as Metis detects anomalies and knows when things break.
Metis walks your developers end-to-end through the software development life cycle. This way, developers can finally own their databases, work with them end-to-end with no input from other teams, and self-serve everything on their own. This cuts the communication, releases many of your teams, and makes developers achieve more by doing less.
Summary
We limit our developers by not letting them own their databases. We need to provide them with tools that can analyze their applications, give actionable insights, and troubleshoot issues automatically. This way, we can make developers work within their teams only to minimize communication and cut the dependencies on other teams. Developers can finally work on their own and not wait for others to assist them. This is why database guardrails are crucial for your business. Metis gives you an end-to-end database reliability solution that the developers love.
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