This is the fifth part in the DevOps 101 series and it’s time to talk about automation. Before we get into it, I just want to recap what DevOps is. Microsoft’s Donovan Brown sums it up nicely in a single sentence: DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users. The important thing to remember here is the order in which he talks: people, process, and products. That’s the way DevOps works.

In this fourth session in our DevOps 101 series, we’re going to delve into Database DevOps specifically. But before we get going, I just want to do a quick check to make sure we’re all on the same page. Donovan Brown’s definition of DevOps seems to have been adopted by almost everyone nowadays because it’s very clear: “DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users”.

I’ve written before about building your own monitoring systems versus buying a monitoring tool like Redgate SQL Monitor. There I talked about the time that someone tasked with managing and maintaining data gets back in their day when they purchase a monitoring solution. However, that’s not where the business focuses. The business frequently wants to know one thing and one thing only: what’s the return on this investment (ROI).

I was recently joined by Chris Yates, Senior Vice President, Managing Director of Data and Architecture at Republic Bank for our webinar, Gain the competitive edge with a monitoring tool. The session sparked an insightful conversation around estate monitoring from the perspective of a Senior VP, and I wanted to share some of the key take-aways.

This is the third part of my DevOps 101 series, so before we get going, let’s do a quick recap of what we’ve covered previously In DevOps 101: What, who, why, and how, I talked about how the definition from Microsoft’s Donovan Brown encapsulates DevOps succinctly as: The union of people, process, and products, to enable the continuous delivery of value to the end users.