With the growing understanding that application release speed has a direct relationship with revenue, businesses across all industries are embracing DevOps as a guiding philosophy for fast application development. They’ve constructed toolchains that integrate everything from codebase versioning to configuration management, with software pipelines automating the provisioning, configuration, and deployment of infrastructure and code in mere minutes. The goal? A state of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) in which build/test cycles can be shortened so that high-quality releases are quickly delivered to the business. Organizations see CI/CD as a means to achieving key objectives of a DevOps practice.
Unfortunately, many teams base their initiatives on CI/CD pipelines that insufficiently address one of the most important elements in the software development lifecycle—data. Operations teams might be able to provision a new application environment in three minutes, but the data might not
be there for three weeks. This makes automating data delivery the key to implementing a truly complete software development toolchain and, ultimately, realizing the promise of DevOps.