I was a last minute volunteer to speak at the March meeting and used it as a chance to talk about Devops for the DBA as a practice run for my session at the upcoming Orlando Code Camp. One of the nice things about having been to the group as a speaker a few times is I have enough cred to do something not polished. I had an outline, but no slides and no demos. I ended up running long, finding areas I could cut and places where I need a demo and a couple charts. In spite of (or because) we had a nice free flowing presentation where we talked about a lot of issues and got them thinking about what they needed to learn.

Thinking about the questions and the topic, source control is huge. Going into Devops means learning (or learning more) about source control, understanding the various approaches to managing a db in source control, and understanding what tools support that. The other part that was clearly frustrating to almost all is that many are told to do devops, but devops isn’t prescriptive. It’s easy to slap the label on a team, but for many it seemed like it was a label only.