Applications are the nexus of the modern enterprise. They simplify operations, speed execution, and drive competitive advantage. Accelerating the application lifecycle means accelerating the business. Increasingly, organizations turn to public and private clouds, SaaS offerings, and outsourcing to hasten development and reduce risk, only to find themselves held hostage by their data.
Applications are nothing without data. Enterprise applications have data anchored in infrastructure, tied down by production requirements, legacy architecture, and security regulations. But projects demand fresh data under the control of their developers and testers, requiring processes to work around these impediments. The suboptimal result leads to cost overruns, schedule delays, and poor quality.
Agile development requires agile data. Agile data empowers developers and testers to control their data on their schedule. It unburdens IT by efficiently providing data where it is needed independent of underlying infrastructure. And it accelerates application delivery by providing fresh and complete data whenever necessary. It grants its users super powers.
Many technologies can solve part of the agile data problem, but a partial solution still leaves you with suboptimal processes that impede your business. A complete agile data solution must embrace the following attributes.
Non Disruptive Synchronization
Production data is sensitive. The environment has been highly optimized and secured, and its continued operation is critical to the success of the business – introducing risk is unacceptable. An agile data solution must automatically synchronize with production data such that it can provide fresh and relevant data copies, but it cannot mandate changes to how the production environment is managed, nor can its operation jeopardize the performance or success of business critical activities.
Service Provisioning
Data is more than just a sequence of bits. Projects access data through relational databases, NoSQL databases, REST APIs, or other APIs. An agile data solution must move beyond copying the physical representation of the data by instantiating and configuring the systems to access that data. Leaving this process to the end users induces delays and amplifies risk.
Source Freedom
Data is pervasive. Efforts to mandate a single data representation, be it a particular relational or NoSQL system, rarely succeed and limit the ability of projects to choose the data representation most appropriate for their needs. As projects needs diversify the data landscape, the ability to manage all data through a single experience becomes essential. This unified agile experience necessitates a solution not tied to a single data source.
Platform Independence
The premier storage, virtualization, and compute platforms of today may be next year’s legacy architecture. Solutions limited to a single platform inhibit the ability of organizations to capitalize on advances in the industry, be it a high performance flash array or new private cloud software. Agility over time requires a solution that is not tied to the implementation of a particular hardware or software platform.
Efficient Copies
Storage costs money, and time costs the business. Agile development requires a proliferation of data copies for each developer and tester, magnifying these effects. Working around the issue with partial data leads to costly errors that are caught late in the application lifecycle, if at all. An agile solution must be able to create, refresh, and rollback copies of production data in minutes while consuming a fraction of the space required for a full copy.
Workflow Customization
Each development environment has its own application lifecycle workflow. Data may need to be masked, projects may need multiple branches with different schemas, or developers may need to restart services as data is refreshed. Pushing responsibility to the end user is error prone and impedes application delivery. An agile solution must provide stable interfaces for automation and customization such that it can adapt to any development workflow.
Self Service Data
Developers and testers dictate the pace of their assigned tasks, and each task affects the data. Agile development mandates that developers have the ability to transform, refresh, and roll back their data without interference. This experience should shield the user from the implementation details of the environment to limit confusion and reduce opportunity for error.
Resource Management
Each data copy consumes resources through storage, memory, and compute. Once developers experience the power of agile data, they will want more \copies, run workloads on them for which they were not designed, and forget to delete them when they are through. As these resources become scarce, the failure modes (such as poor performance) become more expensive to diagnose and repair. Combatting this data sprawl requires visibility into performance and capacity usage, accountability through auditing and reports, and proactive resource constraints.
Delphix is the agile data platform of the future. You can sync to your production database, instantly provision virtual databases where they are needed using miniscule amount space, and provide each developer their own copy of the data that can be refreshed and rolled back on demand. This platform will become only more powerful over time as we add new data sources, provide richer workflows targeting specific applications and use cases, and streamline the self service model. An enterprise data strategy without Delphix is just a path to more data anchors, necessitating suboptimal processes that continue to slow application development and your business.