Case Study: How Unico's Platform Engineering Team Closed the DevOps/Databases Gap Using Atlas

"Month over month, we see smaller and smaller incidents.", Luiz Casali, Sr Engineering Manager

Company Background

Unico is a leading digital identity technology provider in Brazil, developing secure and efficient digital identity solutions for businesses and individuals. Their platform helps organizations streamline identity verification processes, delivering a seamless user experience while enhancing security and reducing fraud.

The Missing Layer: Tackling Complexity, Outages, and Risks in Database Schema Management

At Unico, the Platform Engineering team, led by Luiz Casali, is focused on improving developer productivity. "Reducing complexity for developers is one of our top priorities," Luiz explained.

Unico's Platform team had previously built solutions to automate CI/CD workflows for code using Bazel and GitHub Actions and for infrastructure using Terraform and Atlantis. The team was missing a standardized solution for managing database schema changes.

This gap introduced several pressing issues:

1. Risky Manual Processes: Database schema changes (migrations) were performed manually, increasing the chance of human error.
2. Unreliable Deployments: Unplanned, database-related outages were common, emphasizing the need for a safer way to handle database changes.
3. Compliance Requirements: The team needed to document and review schema changes to maintain governance standards, but the lack of automation made this challenging.

Determined to bridge this gap and establish a safer, more efficient solution for developers, Unico's Platform Engineering team began researching the best database migration tools. Thiago da Silva Conceição, a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) in the team, took the lead on this technical evaluation.

The Challenge of Managing Database Schema Migrations

Traditional schema migration tools posed significant challenges for Unico. As Thiago noted, "Automation with our previous tool was never easy to maintain. It followed a specific pattern, and only a few team members were familiar with it." The team faced limitations that affected usability, integration, and overall productivity:

• Limited Usability and Adoption: The tool required extensive knowledge, and documentation was limited, making it difficult to adopt across the team.
• Lack of Automation Support: Automated migrations and reliable error-handling were lacking, leading to inconsistent deployments and a need for additional manual oversight.
• Compliance Difficulties: The absence of automated documentation and governance features made it challenging to maintain and provide records for audit and compliance requirements.

With these challenges in mind, Unico needed a solution that could offer usability, integration with existing tools, and comprehensive metrics to continuously monitor and improve database migrations.

Evaluating Alternatives and Choosing Atlas

"In the end, choosing Atlas was easy. It is a simple, yet powerful tool, offering a significant impact with many ready-made features that would require customization in other tools."
Thiago Silva Conceição, SRE, Unico

During the search for a new solution, Unico's engineering team prioritized several criteria:

1. Ease of Use: The tool needed to be straightforward and accessible for all developers, not just a few specialized team members.
2. Integration and Compatibility: It had to fit naturally with Unico's technology stack, particularly with Terraform, which was already in heavy use.
3. Metrics and Alerts: Real-time insights and alerts were essential to monitor migrations effectively.

Thiago compared a few traditional solutions before selecting Atlas. Atlas's declarative schema-as-code approach, along with its HCL compatibility and robust cloud management, aligned well with Unico's needs. It allowed the team to automate migrations, eliminate manual errors, and centralize schema management, creating a unified experience across their projects. "Atlas allowed us to keep the DDL in HCL while still supporting SQL scripts for specific use cases through its versioning model," Thiago shared.

One Migration Tool to Rule Them All

Another key priority for Unico's Platform Engineering team was standardization. With multiple teams working across diverse programming languages and databases, The Platform Engineering team needed a unified migration tool that would work for a wide array of use cases, without sacrificing ease of use or reliability. To simplify the developer experience and streamline internal operations, they aimed to find a single solution that could support all teams consistently and seamlessly.

Atlas emerged as the ideal fit by providing plugin support for various databases, ORMs and integrations, making it a flexible tool for Unico's entire tech stack. The ability to standardize migration management with Atlas allowed Unico's Platform Engineering team to enforce consistent practices across all projects. Atlas became the single source of truth for schema management, offering a centralized framework for building policies, integrating into CI/CD pipelines, and supporting developers.

By implementing Atlas as a standard, the Platform Engineering team eliminated the need to train on or maintain multiple tools, reducing complexity and operational overhead. Now, Unico's developers enjoy a unified experience, and the platform team has only one tool to integrate, support, and scale as the company grows.

Implementation: A Smooth Migration Process

The migration to Atlas was seamless, with no need to recreate migration files or impose rigid formats. "We simply imported the schemas from the production database, keeping the process straightforward and efficient," Thiago said. The team was able to quickly onboard Atlas and start seeing results, with pre-built actions in Atlas Cloud providing essential metrics, notifications, and dashboards for tracking progress.

This success reinforced the decision to adopt Atlas:

"Month over month, we see smaller and smaller incidents.

— Luiz Casali, Senior Engineering Manager

Outcome: Faster Development Cycles, Increased Reliability, and Enhanced Compliance

With Atlas in place, Unico's Platform Engineering team has achieved several key outcomes:

• Accelerated Development Cycles: Automation of database migrations streamlined the development process, enabling faster iterations and more
• rapid deployments.
• Increased Reliability: Atlas's linting and testing tools reduced migration errors and enhanced deployment stability, contributing to Unico's goal of reducing incidents.
• Enhanced Compliance: Atlas's automated documentation ensures that each migration step is recorded, simplifying compliance by providing a clear, auditable record of all schema changes.

By automating these processes, the team has successfully reduced manual work and achieved a more predictable migration workflow. Now, as Unico grows, they are assured that their migration practices will scale smoothly, maintaining operational costs without sacrificing speed or reliability.

Getting Started

Atlas brings the declarative mindset of infrastructure-as-code to database schema management, similar to Terraform, but focused on databases. Using its unique schema-as-code approach, teams can quickly inspect existing databases and get started with minimal setup.

Like Unico, we recommend anyone looking for a schema migration solution to get started with Atlas by trying it out on one or two small projects. Dive into the documentation, join our Discord community for support, and start managing your schemas as code with ease.