Things Platform Engineers Lack When Dealing With Databases

Platform engineers focus on all phases of SDLC around databases. However, they lack the tools, processes, and mindset to unleash the power of their teams. Let’s see what they miss and how to change our organizations to move faster.

Tools For Shift-left

Platform engineers want to move everything to the left to unleash the power of their teams and developers. Shift-left involves moving tasks earlier in the development pipeline, particularly focusing on testing at earlier stages rather than waiting until the end. This approach stems from the understanding that late-stage testing often leads to significant problems. When testing is left until the end, it’s frequently rushed due to time or resource constraints, resulting in only basic tests being performed while edge cases are overlooked. Moreover, any issues discovered late in the process become costly, as much of the implementation is already completed and has progressed through most of the pipeline.

Developers require tools that enable them to work with databases independently. These tools should provide visibility into the database state, offer meaningful database-oriented metrics, and deliver insights into database internals. Additionally, these tools must seamlessly integrate with developers' environments, CI/CD pipelines, IDEs, and other development tools. Developers should be equipped with tools that allow them to build and maintain databases with the same ease and efficiency as they do with their applications.

Platform engineers don’t have these tools as of today. Databases are still siloed by DBAs and remain a mystery for developers. Platform engineers need database guardrails to change that.

Monitoring And Understanding

Another issue is around monitoring and raw data points. Monitoring platforms swamp us with data instead of understanding. Developers seek to thoroughly understand the inner workings of their applications. They rely on tools like debuggers, profilers, tracers, and monitors to gain insights into how different components of their architecture interact and impact overall performance. Unfortunately, many monitoring solutions prioritize quantity over quality, aggregating hundreds or thousands of metrics into dashboards that display everything at once. This overloads developers with unnecessary data, making it harder for them to gain meaningful insights.

Developers often find themselves sifting through numerous automated metrics from infrastructure, operating systems, runtimes, networks, and other operational areas. However, when issues arise, these metrics often fail to provide the necessary context to diagnose problems effectively.

What developers truly need are solutions that can build a comprehensive understanding of what occurred. Instead of merely noting a CPU spike, these tools should explain how it happened and what steps to take next. Most monitoring solutions stop at collecting and displaying data points, but developers need systems that can explain why metrics changed and how to respond.

Unfortunately, platform engineers don’t have these tools yet. Database guardrails make a perfect solution to this problem.

Self-Servicing

Last but not least, platform engineers need to make teams self-service their issues. Developers cannot afford to wait for input or manual responses from other teams. Automation is essential, allowing developers to have direct control over processes. They need the ability to resolve issues independently through automated solutions and self-service platforms, eliminating the need for manual intervention from other teams.

This shift towards automation is essential for the entire industry. We can no longer rely on manual processes, such as registration forms, onboarding spreadsheets, or other tasks that require manual handling. Automation is crucial for enabling developers to configure and optimize their databases on their own, which in turn boosts development speed and reduces Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).

This becomes easy when developers have tools that show them everything they need. Database guardrails let them regain control of their databases. Platform engineers just need to deploy solutions and let the developers use them.

Database Guardrails To The Rescue

All the issues mentioned above can be solved with database guardrails. They help developers investigate their issues early in development, provide observability for the production databases, and let development teams work independently. Platform engineers can use database guardrails to change their organizations and unleash the power of their teams. Metis stands at the head of the database guardrails and observability 2.0 movement. You can use Metis and supercharge your organization today.