Meet the modern day agile data tier – improving DevOp efficiencies
DevOps teams are constantly in the high-pressure environment of reacting to real-time market and industry changes and launching new features and functionality to maintain competitive positioning. Accelerating development is simply not possible if scalability is an issue. Scaling databases has proven to be especially challenging. Software rollout cycles can easily get delayed because of the complexity of coding for database scale out. At the same time, a lack of understanding and visibility of app behavior can also result in slow apps getting launched. Without intense technical development, databases can be the function hindering your apps – but they don’t have to be.
DevOps: Resist the urge to do-it-yourself
As pressures mount to deliver more and more applications, DevOps teams can benefit from creating an agile data tier that seamlessly addresses the most technical, yet burdensome, administrative functions of databases and lets software do the hard work instead. It is now possible for DevOps teams to offload database scalability and failover without increasing app complexity and enable a zero downtime experience along the way.
Database load balancing software enables this agile data tier. It acts as an abstraction layer between apps and databases, getting developers out of the business of programming for the database and letting them instead spend their time on more strategic projects. Having an agile data tier profoundly reduces development time, taking dev cycles from months to weeks.
The last thing any developer wants is for an app to become more complex and burdensome – both are big risks when dealing with databases. But there is more to database load balancing then other kinds of load balancing. Replication-aware load balancing, read/write split and caching functionality are all crucial for database scale out. But designing those functions directly into the app is time consuming and repetitive. Designing for high availability just adds to the complications.
With database load balancing the idea is to take this burden off of the app – and therefore off the developer – resulting in faster rollout, better scalability, and the ability to refocus time and attention to features and functionality that contribute to the business. What developer woke up this morning craving to spend a good chunk of their time on programming for database scale out?
Making applications fundamentally less complex and improving their availability, database abstraction solutions that provide database load balancing such as ScaleArc, the company I founded deliver on the promise of scale and always-on app availability. Such software makes application design far simpler, leaving more time to develop and build applications that drive business advantage.
About the Author/Varun Singh
As Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Varun Singh leads ScaleArc’s product development and technology strategy. He also served as ScaleArc’s CEO from March 2009 to September 2013 and was responsible for impressive company growth and customer acquisition of top brands including Tesla Motors and Zuililly with limited if non existant marketing or sales budgets. Varun is a technologist with broad experience in several fiends, from running Linux-based BBS sytems in the pre-Internet days to writing about technology and open source software at PC Quest, CHIP, Digit and Network Computing. He was responsible for creating India’s top online technology brands and his team kept CNN India running as the only uninterrupted news network during the Mumbai terrorist attacks.