Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation

Chapter 12. Managing Data

Introduction

Data and its management and organization pose a particular set of problems for testing and deployment processes for two reasons. First, there is the sheer volume of information that is generally involved. The bytes allocated to encoding the behavior of our application—its source code and configuration information—are usually vastly outweighed by the volume of data recording its state. Second is the fact that the lifecycle of application data differs from that of other parts of the system. Application data needs to be preserved—indeed, data usually outlasts the applications that were used to create and access it. Crucially, data needs to be preserved and migrated during new deployments or rollbacks of a ...