Ok, so I’ve been really excited about this “deployment automation” stuff! That’s not really new, though. I’ve been trying to implement some form of database source control for a few years now, with minimal success. The reasons are various:
- The tools aren’t all that great. That’s not really their fault, though.
- There’s not really a true way of doing it, as far as databases are concerned (which is why the tools aren’t that great). Like everything else in database land, the approach sorta… “depends” on a number of different things.
But this isn’t a post about source control or automation! Not yet, anyway. This is a post about how I’m getting ready for it.
We live in an amazing era; tools and processes that were really difficult 5 years ago are easily available now, and work really well. Take Azure and devops, for example! It is really easy to get setup with a free account, download a bunch of tools, and get going. That should be its own post…
I’ve already got my azure instance up and running, so next for me is setup a local environment and a bunch of vms. I picked up a relatively inexpensive machine just two nights ago, a dell inspiron 3670. With a 8th-gen core i5-8400, a 1TB drive and 12GB of RAM, it should provide enough umph to run a couple of VMs and setup some basic integration between local and the cloud. In the next few posts, I’m going to detail how I got things setup.