3 posts tagged with "github-actions"

In part one, we demonstrated how to initialize an Atlas project, and create a CI/CD pipeline that automatically plans, verifies and stores your database migrations in Atlas Cloud using GitHub Actions.

In this part, we will show how to deploy these migrations using the Atlas Operator and ArgoCD to demonstrate a complete GitOps workflow for database migrations.

How to GitOps your Database Migrations on Kubernetes​

"We can wrap existing schema management solutions into containers, and run them in Kubernetes as Jobs. But that is SILLY. That is not how we work in Kubernetes."

-Viktor Farcic, DevOps ToolKit

GitOps is a software development and deployment methodology that uses Git as the central repository for both code and infrastructure configuration, enabling automated and auditable deployments.

ArgoCD is a Kubernetes-native continuous delivery tool that implements GitOps principles. It uses a declarative approach to deploy applications to Kubernetes, ensuring that the desired state of the application is always maintained.

Kubernetes Operators are software extensions to Kubernetes that enable the automation and management of complex, application-specific, operational tasks with domain-specific knowledge within a Kubernetes cluster.

In this tutorial, we will use the Atlas Operator in tandem with Atlas Cloud and ArgoCD to create a slick, modern GitOps workflow for managing your database migrations natively in Kubernetes.

For the sake of brevity, we are going to split this guide into two parts:

1. In part one, we will show how to initialize an Atlas project, and create a CI/CD pipeline that will automatically plan, verify and store your database migrations in Atlas Cloud using GitHub Actions.
2. In part two, we will show how to deploy these migrations using the Atlas Operator and ArgoCD to demonstrate a complete GitOps workflow for database migrations.

Losing data is painful for almost all organizations. This is one of the reasons teams are very cautious when it comes to making changes to their databases. In fact, many teams set explicit policies on what kinds of changes to the database are allowed, often completely prohibiting any change that is destructive.

Destructive changes are changes to a database schema that result in loss of data. For instance, consider a statement such as:

ALTER TABLE `users` DROP COLUMN `email_address`;

This statement is considered destructive because whatever data is stored in the email_address column will be deleted from disk, with no way to recover it.