Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery

Chapter 9. How to Store Data

In Chapter 8, you learned how to protect your data in transit and at rest. In this chapter, you’ll learn about other aspects of data, including storage, querying, and replication. What data am I referring to? Just about all software relies on data: social networking apps need profile, connection, and messaging data; shopping apps need inventory and purchase data; fitness apps need workout and activity data.

Data is one of your most valuable, longest-lived assets. In all likelihood, your data will outlive your shiny web framework, your orchestration tool, your service mesh, your CI/CD pipeline, most employees at your company, and perhaps even the company itself, starting a second life as part of an acquisition. Data is important, and this chapter will show you how to manage it properly, covering the following use cases:

Local storage

Hard drives

Primary data store

Relational databases

Caching

Key-value stores and content distribution networks (CDNs)

File storage

File servers and object stores

Semistructured data and search

Document stores

Analytics

Columnar databases

Asynchronous processing

Queues and streams

Scalability and availability

Replication and partitioning

Backup and recovery

Snapshots, continuous backups, and replication

As you go through these use cases, this chapter will walk you through hands-on examples, including deploying a PostgreSQL database, automating schema migrations, configuring backups and replication, serving ...