DBA Role Shift in a DevOps World

5/5/2016 2www.datavail.com
A bit about today
The Question:
What happens to a DBA in a DevOps continuous deployment environment?
1
2
The session will explore both the strategic & practical aspects of
how the DBA role is impacted with the adoption of DevOps.
Firsthand experiences from a DBA and the organization learning
gained during these transitions will be featured during the
presentation.
Scott:
50% of the presentation
Business & CIO focus; organization dynamics & change
Chuck:
50% of the presentation
Technical content, practical experience & case study

Career Highlights
• Managed delivery of 275 seat, multi-location application
development center
• Established 6 European datacenters, 2 application
outsourcing centers, and a 24x7 multi-lingual call center
• Developed multiple IT strategies to support carve-outs
and business consolidations of mid-market companies
• Founded a cloud hosting company
• Lead 4 M&A transactions
Fun Facts:
• Building an Arduino controlled robotic arm
• Compete in 1,000 yard IBS target shooting
Introduction: Scott Frock
EVP and Chief Operating Officer at Datavail, North America’s largest DBA
services company with 600 DBAs on our direct payroll
29 years of IT industry experience in a variety of technical and managerial
roles for organizations including State of Ohio, EDS, CIBER, Highstreet, and
Datavail

Technology Experience
• Oracle database administration and tuning
• .NET, T-SQL, C#, PHP, JavaScript, Java, ANSI SQL,
PL/SQL, APEX, and many other languages on operating
systems by Oracle, HP, IBM, Linux and Windows
• SSMS, Oracle OEM, AppDynamics, Splunk, and Visual
VM for performance tuning operations
Fun Facts:
• Comes from four generations of Florida Cattlemen on a
1200+ acre cattle ranch settled in 1850s
• Artist, Graphic Designer & Semi-Pro Photographer
Introduction: Chuck Ezell
Chuck Ezell leads Datavail’s global Development, Tuning, and Automation
practice
22 years of experience as a multi-platform application development DBA
Specialist in database performance tuning, automation and ETL
management

What is DevOps?
There is no right or wrong answer
For some it’s a paradigm, others it’s a methodology, some an org chart,
others a job title
Application
Development
OperationsDevOps
DevOps accelerates delivery
of business value
• Time to market
• Improve connectivity
to business
• Increase customer
input and feedback
cycles
For today, we want to think about DevOps in the context of combining
Application Development and Operational activities into a high-
performance, empowered team

So how did we get here where we now need this change?
In the 80s we improved quality by separating IT into smaller functional
teams (aka silos) such as development, testing, and operations. We
appointed leaders, analyzed the process, and improved execution
These structure changes helped support new requirements coming from
adoption of a major architecture change as technology shifted from central
(mainframe) to distributed (client-server) computing
• Developer coded, installed, and
took pager calls
• Operations serviced the hardware
• Deployments to 1,000s of end-nodes
drove need for separate teams to
manage roll-outs
• Complexity increased

Results
1. Focus brought quality, primarily as
measured by defect rate
2. Time to market (release frequency)
went down
3. We measured more things. Internal
metrics emerged (SLOs – thanks in part to
the outsourcers) so process success could
be declared… but with separation of the
business process, the connectivity to the
true business became lost and behaviors
sometimes aligned on the achieving the
wrong items
The focus left the voice of the customer and velocity slowed….

So didn’t agile fix this?
It certainly helped
• The focus on the user story returned
to the forefront
• Competitive differentiators were
defined and measured
• Focus went back to the
user experience rather than
internal SLOs
Then technology got more complex, budgets were trimmed,
India said we can do it for a LOT less, and the business said
give me more (for a LOT less)
But, the ability to realize the full potential was still
hampered by…
the org chart

The one true org chart
From the time we sat in our first computer science class, our minds
were filled with the concept of THE one true org chart
This structure, while practical in design, reinforced separation of duty
rather than cooperation
So where are our DBAs?
CIO
Infrastructure
Facilities Operations
Applications
Development Testing

Today, DBAs exist in both teams!
Focus on patching, security settings,
backup, deadlocks, incident
management, and service request
Infrastructure Applications
Focus on schema design, developing
optimal SQL, making data available to
the “edge” through web-services, BI/DW
So who is responsible for managing the business data?
The lack of a single, clear answer is the main reason we are
seeing progressive companies, across all industries, make a
fundamental change to their structure

A new “data focused” paradigm
There is a new trend emerging over the last decade where companies
recognize a limitation with the traditional org structure
What is the most valuable asset a business has?
We are seeing with increasing frequency the classic 2 tower structure
replaced with a 3 tower structure across all industries:
CIO
Infrastructure
Data
MDM Integration BI/DW
Applications
Development Testing
The data tower becomes the corporate steward for master data,
where the single record of the data truth is known
People? Customers? Data?

A elevation of the DBA role
The new structure creates a logical, consolidated home for DBA’s
CIO
Infrastructure
Data
MDM Integration BI/DW
Applications
Development Testing
The role of the DBA now has a leadership responsibility to manage, protect, and
LEVERAGE a key corporate asset
This elevation of data does not solve the earlier problem separation of duties
created --- it could be argued that it amplifies it by creating a new silo
In comes DevOps – the breaking down of the barriers across the functional teams

Accountability
for Standards,
Compliance,
Governance
What we’ve seen work
We believe a matrix organization is the best way to structure and drive
DevOps strategies
CIO
Infrastructure Data Application
DevOps App Team 1
DevOps App Team 2
Functional Line Managers,
There is no room in this
organization for “command and
control leaders”
Collaboration & Team must
define the culture

Full Life Cycle Responsibility
We believe a matrix organization is the best way to structure and drive
DevOps strategies
CIO
Infrastructure Data Application
DevOps App Team 1
DevOps App Team 2
Application DevOps teams,

Matrix teams aren’t new: what gives?

DevOps Culture Critical Success Factors (CSFs)
1. Make the focus on the customer impact and time to market
(releases measured in days not quarters)
2. Deploy self-contained cross-functional teams (DEV, DBA, Testing, Ops)
3. Empowered and authorize teams – full authority over application experience and
methodologies (design, build, operate), including technologies, architecture, and
integration methods. New tools will be needed….
4. Demand fanatical support – especially post implementation
– Responsibilities are end-to-end – Everyone is 24x7
– I built it and you run it does not exist in DevOps
– You build crap, you get called first at night to fix it, then to the CIOs office in the
morning to explain
5. Each team member must be passionate and entrepreneurial about their role and
the team
Demand innovation – expect brilliance

Other than team structure, what else?
Expect an elevation in the role technology in the process
• Automated testing – a must have; even if only for core functionality
• Embed instrumentation – from the beginning of the development cycle;
then double it
• Use automated release management (and roll-back) such as
containerization technologies like Docker, and deployment technologies
like Octopus Deploy, Chef, Puppet
• Monitoring, monitoring, monitoring – not just server characteristics, but
business processes and user experiences
• Solve for the DBA - the DBA is one function that can’t be replaced with
automation – schema changes typically aren’t scripted as too complex a
1x. A managed service to support deployment can be a great aid to keep
your team happy

How DevOps is Impacting
the DBA's Role

Traditional DBA’s Responsibilities
Planning, Installing and Configuring a Database Platform
Planning, designing and creating databases
Planning, designing and implementing High Availability and
Disaster Recovery for each database (HADR)
Maintaining and monitoring the database platform
Occasionally implementing some performance tuning on the
databases
Re-balancing workloads across database servers based on
monitoring
Securing databases platforms and individual databases based
on requirements and implementation

The Growing DBA Support Role
One
31%
Two
41%
Three to Five
21%
More than Five
7% Number of Database
Platforms an Average DBA
has to support daily.
One
Two
Three to Five
More than Five

The DBA’s New Workload
100% of DBAs surveyed are responsible for
multiple databases
75% of this say the number of instances are
steadily growing
70% say they manage DBs from different
vendors (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, etc.)
60% say they are spending more time on
performance tuning beyond their daily tasks
Workload is increasing, becoming more
diverse and performance is a moving target.
* Study performed by DBTA sponsored by Dell 2015

The Growing Expectation Gap
45% say change management is a critical
task in today’s database environment
33% DBAs agree that supporting
development database provisioning is
critical to their daily tasks.
100% DBAs agreed that automation was an
area of needed focus and growth
Managing changes, increasing deployment
schedules, support new/diverse development
needs dictates some form of automation.
* Study performed by DBTA sponsored by Dell 2015

Toolset Changing Landscape
Increasing platform dependencies
Silo data migrating to consolidated data platforms
Need to learn new technologies for provisioning.
Increasing pressure to deploy changes quickly & often
Growing need for more disposable development DBs

New Demands for Technical Knowledge
GUI
• Javascript
• HTML
• CSS
Server
• C# .NET
• Java
• PHP
• XML/JSON
• SQL
Database
• SQL Server
• Oracle
• MySQL
• NoSQL
Automation
& Deployment
• Jenkins
• Bamboo
• OctopusDeploy
• Docker
• Chef
QA/Testing
• Load Testing
• Vulnerability Testing
• Code Review
• Tuning
Continuous
Integration

Smoothing Code Deployments
Customer: Fast Casual Restaurant Chain
Problem:
• Were manually performing code deployments to Weblogic platform 1
per week for Retail, Catering, eCommerce, Mobile (plus 7 other internal apps)
• Were manually pulling DB schema & java/jsp changes from dev
environment, and pushing to production environment.
• Code push were sometimes being pushed to the wrong server.
• Taking close to 2 hours on a good deployment with many on conference
call together.
Success Story:
• Took over the deployment activity, freeing their internal resources
• Develop scripts to automation code push to proper location on a
schedule during the window for their release
• Moved to pushes 2-3 times per day.
Reduced costs in Employee time investment in deployments,
increased success of deployments and deployment frequency

Performance Health Checks
Customer: Electronic Components & Computer Parts Company
Problem:
• One of the largest Oracle EBS implementation in the world.
• We manage all the code pushes that happen 3-4 times per day
• Database replications, execution plan changes, schema changes all
happening multiple times per day.
• Data growth is fast and unpredictable
Success Story:
• Implemented twice daily automated health checks
• Provides deep insight into data growth, performance for specific
database programs and underperforming SQL, weekly tasking for
Performance Tuning & Table Reorgs
• Exposes poor code & schema changes very quickly providing operations
& development time to provide quick change turnarounds.
Transformed their costs in time and money to drive
improvements beyond simply “lights on” support.

Customer: Electronic Components & Computer Parts Company
Problem:
• 8 – 10,000 incidents per mo., 90% automated from OEM Grid.
• 6-10 complex clones per month typically delivered off-hours with little
client oversight
• 1,500 – 2,000 Request for Change per mo., Initiated by 300+ off shore
developers
• 5 environments with differing outage windows, 2 PROD, 3 Quality
Success Story:
• Developed an alert management engine with detailed metrics on
productivity, failure rates, failure reasons, trending by reason code,
developer submitted by, etc.
• Detailed queue depth reporting, historical and dashboard
• Integrated into customer ticketing system
DBAs taking the proactive, initiative to create unique
IP that drives solutions with facts & metrics
Managing Monitoring Alerts

Alert Optimizer in Action:
Dynamic Skyscraper Chart
Dynamic Heat Map by Week Series

DevOps
DBA
DevOps
DBA
DTA DevOps DBA Services
• Development
• Java
• C# .NET
• APEX
• PHP
• SQL / Stored Procedures
• Performance
• SQL Tuning
• Vulnerability & Load Testing
• ETL Tuning & Improvement
• Continuous Integration
• Jenkins/Bamboo
• OctopusDeploy
• Docker / Chef
• SQL
• Data & Data Structures
• Monitoring & Tuning
• SSIS, Informatica, SQL, App Code

DevOps Services Working Together
Planning
Build/Create
QA Testing
Deployment
Tuning
Code Review
Testing
Release Automation
Monitoring/Discovery
Development
Quality
Assurance
Operations
DevOps
DBA
We’ve learned it’s about
flexibility, communication
and teamwork.

In Closing: DevOps Making a Significant Impact on DBAs
The new DevOps paradigm makes a lot of sense.
Solutions are not always straight forward, clearly seen
or easily resolved.
The role of the DBA is not going anywhere. In fact, it’s
becoming more critical to the success of DevOps.
The modern DBAs daily job has grown beyond a
database focused effort.
The need for proactive thinking, areas where
automation can be introduced and acting somewhat
like a developer at times is becoming more of a
standard expectation

Chuck Ezell
DTA Practice Leader
chuck.ezell@datavail.com
478.832.8119 (m)
Scott Frock
EVP & Chief Operating Officer
scott.frock@datavail.com
717.422.0700 (m)
Contact Info

DBA Role Shift in a DevOps World

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