Foreword
Collectively, we are witnessing a time of unprecedented change and disruption in the database industry. Technology adoption life cycles have accelerated to the point where all of our heads are spinning—with both challenge and opportunity.
Architectures are evolving so quickly that the tasks we became accustomed to performing are no longer required, and the related skills we invested in so heavily are barely relevant. Emerging innovations and pressures in security, Infrastructure as Code, and cloud capabilities (such as Infrastructure and Database as a Service), have allowed us—and required us, actually—to rethink how we build.
By necessity, we have moved away from our traditional, administrative workloads to a process emphasizing architecture, automation, software engineering, continuous integration and delivery, and systems instrumentation skills, above all. Meanwhile, the value and importance of the data we’ve been protecting and caring for all along has increased by an order of magnitude or more, and we see no chance of a future in which it doesn’t continue to increase in value. We find ourselves in the fortunate position of being able to make a meaningful, important difference in the world.
Without a doubt, many of us who once considered ourselves outstanding database administrators are at risk of being overwhelmed or even left behind. Simultaneously, newcomers into our field are thirsty for an organizing paradigm. The answer to both circumstances is the same: a commitment to the delight of learning, to self-improvement, to the optimism, enthusiasm, and confidence it takes to take on a task and see it through to conclusion, despite the inevitable travails and pitfalls. This book is a remarkable achievement. It is an introduction to a new way of thinking about database infrastructure engineering and operations, a guidebook, and a playbook taking all of what we used to do and reimagining it into a new way forward: Database Reliability Engineering.