Continuous Delivery with Docker and Jenkins

Managing database changes

So far, we have focused on the Continuous Delivery process, which was applied to a web service. A simple part of this was that web services are inherently stateless. This fact means that they can be easily updated, restarted, cloned in many instances, and recreated from the given source code. A web service, however, is usually linked to its stateful part, a database that poses new challenges to the delivery process. These challenges can be grouped into the following categories:

• Compatibility: The database schema and the data itself must be compatible with the web service all the time
• Zero-downtime deployment: In order to achieve zero-downtime deployment, we use rolling updates, which means that a database must be ...