Database DevOps Preps Developer and Data Teams for the Future

TL; DR: Developers have to move faster than ever. Thankfully, with the rise of DevOps and its automated capabilities and observability, they can. Liquibase extends these DevOps capabilities to the database. Manually reviewing, testing, and deploying database changes can bring a lot of headaches. Liquibase offers quick and painless database change management, expanding the scope of CI/CD pipelines. We spoke with Loreli Cadapan, VP of Product at Liquibase, about the solution.

Change happens everywhere. From fresh grass sprouting on a lawn to a loved one getting married, we witness change every day.

Although change is constant, I never seem to get used to it when it comes. Dealing with change in general can be hard. But it’s often necessary for growth and renewal. I’ve experienced how change — whether it was going to college or moving to a new city — has given me new opportunities that I wouldn’t have without it.

For developers, change is integral to their workflows. Dev teams continuously review and update to maintain their applications’ security, integrity, and availability. But manual updates often take up too much time and impede the development timeline.

Thankfully, the rise of database DevOps solutions has simplified maintenance tasks by integrating automation. Liquibase brings DevOps practices to the database, streamlining database changes and allowing teams to build and release software faster.

“By treating database change as code, Liquibase automates change management for developers to self-serve database deployments as part of the CI/CD pipeline,” said Loreli Cadapan, VP of Product at Liquibase.

Built for developers, Liquibase allows teams to control when, where, and how database changes are deployed. Liquibase has helped teams streamline their data pipeline and improve security across their database and applications. Since 2012, Liquibase has been downloaded more than 100 million times.

DevOps adoption has skyrocketed. According to Spacelift, DevOps is the most popular process framework among IT teams and is used by 49% of those surveyed. Not only is DevOps popular, but it has also made software development faster.

“CI/CD and DevOps are now pervasive, and these processes rely on synchronized and secure automation. Developers need tools that not only manage application code but also handle their databases efficiently and simplify collaborations with database administrators,” said Loreli.

One thing many DevOps solutions lack, however, is effective database management. Liquibase extends DevOps best practices, including CI/CD automation, observability, and compliance, to the database, simplifying database change management.

“As a complete database DevOps solution, Liquibase works to eliminate manual, error-prone database change reviews and enables granular logging of every database change operation,” said Loreli.

Liquibase enables teams to offload manual database management workloads to save time and money. Users can track, version, and deploy changes to more than 60 different database platforms.

Loreli, who joined the Liquibase team in January 2024, told us Liquibase’s database observability gives teams DevOps-level insights into workflows to detect issues early, optimize workflows, and extend DORA metrics to the database layer. Teams can also do targeted rollbacks without worry.

“Development and data science teams using Liquibase can self-service database deployments quickly with minimal errors for a change management workflow that is as fast, reliable, and streamlined as the rest of the CI/CD pipeline,” said Loreli.

Bringing CI/CD Automation and Observability to Databases

Liquibase treats database change as code. This allows it to automate and integrate database change management with the rest of the CI/CD pipeline.

“Integrating database change with the expanding scope of CI/CD pipelines ensures that these schema migrations – and the applications that rely on them – are integrated, tested, and deployed rapidly and reliably,” said Loreli.

Applying CI/CD automation enables teams to standardize, govern, track, and monitor changes for a more speedy, streamlined workflow that also enhances control and security. But CI/CD automation isn’t the only DevOps practice within Liquibase.

“Liquibase Pro’s observability capabilities give teams the unprecedented ability to monitor their database change management pipelines within their existing dashboards,” said Loreli.

Continuous monitoring helps teams identify patterns and potential vulnerabilities early on, so they can proactively address issues before they escalate into larger problems.

“Every database change — whether it’s a schema modification, a rollback, or a deployment — is tracked and recorded. This helps teams understand the “who, what, and when” behind each change, creating a transparent history of database changes,” said Loreli.

Liquibase compiles logs into reports, so teams can streamline their security audits and ensure compliance. Loreli also said these reports can give teams the breadcrumbs they need to understand problems when they arise and resolve them quickly.

Liquibase began as an open-source project called Liquibase OSS. Loreli said earlier in her career, open source wasn’t an option for enterprises because there wasn’t much confidence in its security and governance.

“But it’s not like that anymore. The open-source software industry has evolved to the point where trust, reliability, and security can be elevated to enterprise standards,” said Loreli.

Much of this change is due to organizations such as The Linux Foundation that help solidify the trustworthiness of open-source projects. Today, open-source solutions are the safer choice, giving users visibility into and control of the projects they choose to use.

“Look at GitHub, for instance, and how much instant visibility it gives you into a project. You can see how many contributors, how active, when it was last merged, how often issues are resolved, and how many stars,” said Loreli.

Another highlight of open-source projects is that they are community-driven. They enhance the technological foundation for the entire industry and allow everyone to do more, better, easier, and faster. As it happens, Liquibase has served as the foundation for database DevOps in the open-source space, as it founded the practice.

“For instance, Harness released a database DevOps tool built on top of Liquibase OSS. Foundationally, it enables that transformative shift to integrate database change management, rather than keep it relegated to external, manual, error-prone processes,” said Loreli.

Loreli told us database change management automation is the bare minimum for today’s data pipelines, which is why Liquibase being an open-source project is so important.

“Anyone can bring DevOps to the database with Liquibase and they can help improve the practice by applying their real-world experiences to optimization strategies via open-source project contributions,” said Loreli.

Liquibase uses its open-source roots not only to extend its capabilities but also to foster a strong community of contributors. The Liquibase community has been an integral part of the solution since its inception, and the team treats it as such.

“We’ve recently increased our investment in the Community and brought aboard a dedicated community product manager to grow and enhance the Community further,” said Loreli.

Loreli said the community is a wealth of guidance and inspiration for the Liquibase road map. The team continuously reviews issues and considers requests from the open-source project. It also reaches out to developers and the rest of the community to understand pain points.

“Most of our new capabilities are influenced by feedback that comes from this Community. They also help us understand which new databases we should support next, especially as cloud and NoSQL data stores are more abundant in every industry,” said Loreli.

In addition to its other feedback methods, Liquibase is building a data-driven feedback strategy to tap into anonymous, non-sensitive data for product analytics.

“With this data, we can more accurately understand the state of technical industries, database change management practices, and even feature-level metrics to guide usability improvements,” said Loreli.

Liquibase is focused on improving the developer experience and making it as easy, quick, and painless as possible to manage database changes. To meet this vision, the team recently enhanced its standard policy checks and launched an advanced, customizable version.

“These Custom Policy Checks up the game on customization so developers can create unique, Python-based checks for guidelines, policies, and best practices. These enforce standardized, consistent database deployments with the most granular levels of control,” said Loreli.

Through its research and development, the team is exploring how it can leverage telemetry, AI, and other solutions to support not only developers and database administrators but other teams in the ever-expanding data journey.

“The future of the developer landscape is the broader data pipeline. We need to integrate and enhance the holistic data journey to support data science and engineering, AI/ML products, and the increasing prevalence of data analytics at every facet of the business,” said Loreli.

Loreli told us that the Liquibase team is exploring every opportunity and weighing it against the guiding question, “Will this make database change management easier, safer, and faster?” As AI rises and more teams join the data journey, Liquibase seeks to be well-positioned to respond to the needs of growing teams.

“The future of the developer landscape is one where barriers to entry and innovation are obliterated by AI and other capabilities. And that means we need to keep the data infrastructure modernized to keep up with the market while making workflows simple, reliable, and seamless,” said Loreli.

To learn more about the Liquibase platform, you can check out its free trial here or this in-depth breakdown of how the platform works here.