Saturday, August 24, 2019

DevOps for Oracle DBA

DevOps is natural evolution for Oracle database administrators or sysadmins of any kind. The key to remain relevant in the industry is to embrace DevOps these days and in near future.

The good news is that if you are an Oracle DBA, you already have the solid foundation. You have worked with the enterprise, world class database system and are aware of high availability, disaster recovery, performance optimization, and troubleshooting. Having said that, there is still lots to learn and unlearn to become a DevOps Engineer.


You would need to look outside of Oracle, Linux Shell and the core competency mantra. You would need to learn a proper computer language such as Python. You would need to learn software engineering framework like Agile methodology, and you would need to learn stuff such as Git. Above all you would need to unlearn that you only manage Database. As DevOps Engineer in today's Cloud era, you would be responsible for end to end delivery.


Without Cloud skills, its impossible to transition from Oracle DBA to DevOps role. Regardless of the cloud provider, you must know the networking, compute, storage, and infrastructure as code. You already know the databases side of things, but now learn a decent amount about other databases as you would be expected to migrate and manage them in the cloud.


So any of public cloud like AWS, Azure, or GCP plus a programming language like Python or Go or NodeJS, plus agile concepts, IaC as Terraform or CloudFormation, and plethora of stuff like code repositories and pipelining would be required to be come an acceptable DevOps Engineer.


Becoming obsolete by merely staying Oracle DBA is not an option. So buckle up and start DevOps journey today.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

But you've left out Oracle Cloud Infrastructure completely! I have no trouble with using +other+ clouds but it makes sense if you're an Oracle DBA to know how OCI works - the transition to running an Oracle database and the whole environment you're talking about makes especially good sense to run it on a platform designed for extreme security and robust networking.