GitLab announced the general availability of GitLab Duo with Amazon Q.
Although DBAs fortunately have the rare ability to bridge the gap between development and operations, they have been detrimentally overlooked in many companies that deploy DevOps practices. A DBA's ability to interrogate code and construct a resilient, well–performing database environment uniquely defines the capabilities needed for DevOps.
Start with DBA: Bridging the Gap Between Development and Operations - Part 1
Reciprocal Teaching
Whether through formal methods such as classroom or virtual training, job shadowing, and mentoring; or through informal methods such as team discussions or presentations, teaching needs to be a frequent element of team integration. It is a given that IT and business teams have difficulty understanding each other without a common taxonomy. Even teams within IT often fail to understand each other.
A developer discussing encapsulation or inheritance may totally perplex a DBA unfamiliar with object-oriented programming terminology. Never mind if you start talking about Agile, which is very new to many IT professionals. Likewise, a DBA ranting about developers "thrashing" the buffer cache is likely to see the "deer in the headlights" stare.
While investigating a performance issue specific to a screen, a developer shared with a DBA that the drop-down window would display ten data elements from which the application user could select. As they looked at the code and then tested the code in a nonprod environment, they learned that the result set was millions of records. The million records would move from the database to the middle tier, and then the needed rows would be pushed to the client application screen. When asking why millions of rows were being returned, the developer said that was a standard practice. After looking into other queries, the DBA soon found herself ranting to several development managers about the developers thrashing the buffer cache and the performance impact. After realizing that these managers did not understand DBA "technical" jargon, she determined that there was a better way to communicate the message. She scheduled a meeting a few days later, in which she put together a presentation deck outlining basic buffer cache concepts with visuals (see Figure 1 ) that demonstrated how large result sets can negatively impact not only the query requesting the data but also every aspect of the database performance.
Figure 1. Buffer cache thrashing
After the DBA spent an hour walking the developers through the presentation and answering questions, these developers understood the impact of less-selective queries. As days and weeks passed, and often when the DBA was visiting the developer realm, developers would jokingly remind each other to not thrash that buffer cache unless they wanted the DBA to get after them. Although the training was succinct and simplified, it closed the language gap, resulting in improved query selection criteria, smaller result sets, and less buffer cache "thrashing."
The point is that even people in the same industry do not necessarily speak the same language. DevOps introduces another language gap that requires purposeful definition to keep all members of the team aligned. This book presumes that readers are technically savvy and already familiar with DevOps and the core terminology, but it may not be true as they begin working with DBAs. Accelerating DBA engagement requires DBAs to understand the DevOps principles and foundational constructs.
Experienced DevOps team members need to educate DBAs on processes, continuous integration and delivery, and the implemented tool set. Demonstrating how code is built, tested, integrated, and released helps DBAs determine where best to interject changes supporting the code cycle. DBAs also need early notification when system changes are necessary, allowing time for the reconfiguration to be completed, tested, security approved, and automated for pipeline consumption.
Processes Anew
Differentiating which DBA inputs to put forth for absorption into existing agile and DevOps processes demands collaborative effort between existing team members and newly assigned DBAs. Cohesive integration to advance the undertaking of capturing additional value at decreased costs lengthens the backbone — the code generation process definitions from start to finish — of the movement, triggering existing processes to be rehashed, or repurposed, and then reacclimated within the SDLC cycle.
Together, DBAs and DevOps team members make old things new again as processes throughout the development, testing, release, and operations support pathway are refined to incorporate DBA tools, change methods, and metrics. The critical goal is to not disrupt the code delivery schedule while reaffirming the automation and process sequence preciseness. Sanctioning a parallel environment that initially mirrors the primary build-to-release architecture onto which the DBA components get added enables a side-by-side comparison to ensure that updated processes work correctly. Of course, automation oversees the execution, examination, and effects reporting.
Quick to Value, Delight the Customer
Excitement for DevOps, besides the "it's the cool thing now" factor, stems from years of frustration as IT professionals have been viewed as moneywasting, unresponsive, slow to deliver, and second-rate business citizens. One of my pet peeves has been the "IT alignment to the business" language. Viewing IT as an "outside" entity having to blend in plans to support or conform to the rest of the business accounts for much disillusion and poor esprit de corps.
When agile development (and DevOps in close pursuit) exploded in popularity, IT folks finally envisioned a promising future in which product delivery proficiencies incessantly eliminate time, process, approval, and implementation waste, and then rocket delivery to the customer. One Lean principle is establish pull. Customers establish pull inherently when reporting problems or requesting new product functionality. IT's capability to deliver has never been this radically empowered, in which demand (pull) can be satisfied within a customer's time expectations.
As consolidated teams, call them agile or DevOps, build new or decouple established services from monolithic applications, change footprints become much smaller (think microservices), making it possible to deploy code quickly with minimal risk. With speed united with smaller code chunks, a failed release becomes no more than a temporary blip on the radar.
This blog is an excerpt from Mike Cuppet's book: DevOps, DBAs, and DBaaS(link is external)
Industry News
Perforce Software and Liquibase announced a strategic partnership to enhance secure and compliant database change management for DevOps teams.
Spacelift announced the launch of Saturnhead AI — an enterprise-grade AI assistant that slashes DevOps troubleshooting time by transforming complex infrastructure logs into clear, actionable explanations.
CodeSecure and FOSSA announced a strategic partnership and native product integration that enables organizations to eliminate security blindspots associated with both third party and open source code.
Bauplan, a Python-first serverless data platform that transforms complex infrastructure processes into a few lines of code over data lakes, announced its launch with $7.5 million in seed funding.
Perforce Software announced the launch of the Kafka Service Bundle, a new offering that provides enterprises with managed open source Apache Kafka at a fraction of the cost of traditional managed providers.
LambdaTest announced the launch of the HyperExecute MCP Server, an enhancement to its AI-native test orchestration platform, HyperExecute.
Cloudflare announced Workers VPC and Workers VPC Private Link, new solutions that enable developers to build secure, global cross-cloud applications on Cloudflare Workers.
Nutrient announced a significant expansion of its cloud-based services, as well as a series of updates to its SDK products, aimed at enhancing the developer experience by allowing developers to build, scale, and innovate with less friction.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(link is external) announced that its Infinity Platform has been named the top-ranked AI-powered cyber security platform in the 2025 Miercom Assessment.
Orca Security announced the Orca Bitbucket App, a cloud-native seamless integration for scanning Bitbucket Repositories.
The Live API for Gemini models is now in Preview, enabling developers to start building and testing more robust, scalable applications with significantly higher rate limits.
Backslash Security(link is external) announced significant adoption of the Backslash App Graph, the industry’s first dynamic digital twin for application code.
SmartBear launched API Hub for Test, a new capability within the company’s API Hub, powered by Swagger.
Akamai Technologies introduced App & API Protector Hybrid.