Database reliability engineering, modernizing the DBA role

Description

Consider this a new database administration primer, focused on teaching the developer taking on Operations; or the systems administrator diving into site reliability. This is about the core concepts of database operations within today’s IT paradigms, which can include continuous deployment and delivery, DevOps culture, infrastructure as code, and cloud/virtualized environments.

By the nature of the topic and time allotted, this talk will focus on breadth, not depth, but should allow the participant to understand the concepts, and gain a framework to focus their additional pursuits and education.

1. Database reliability engineering, overview (5 minutes)

• Site reliability engineering overview/history
• Database administration overview/history
• Today’s operational DBA
• Today’s DBRE

• Knowing your datastore, the CAP theorem
• Designing for operations
• Velocity – managing change
• Efficiency/cost
• Scalability
• Performance
• Availability, resiliency, and anti-fragility

3. Deploy (10 minutes)

• The observability stack
• Configuration management and deployment
• Capacity planning

• Data stewardship – Rule 1, protect the data
• Disaster preparedness and business continuity
• Release engineering and change management