DBRE starting from self-declaration
This is Onkai Yuta (@fat47) from the Service Reliability Group (SRG) of the Media Headquarters.
#SRG(Service Reliability Group) mainly provides cross-sectional support for the infrastructure of our media services, improving existing services, launching new ones, contributing to OSS, etc.
This article is my first introduction to DBRE.
What is DBRE?There is no clear role for DBRE in our company.Trying out working as a self-proclaimed DBREAurora MySQL Upgrade Knowledge Sharing ActivityImproving development productivity with automatic documentation of MySQL environmentsConclusion
What is DBRE?
DBRE (Database Reliability Engineering) refers to engineering that improves the reliability of databases and increases the availability of the entire system. Compared to SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), DBRE is not yet as well known, but awareness is gradually spreading.
There is no clear role for DBRE in our company.
As far as I know, within the CyberAgent Group, there is no independent role or organization called DBRE. I don't think there are any dedicated DBAs either.
*I apologize if this actually exists and I just didn't know about it.
I belong to the cross-sectional SRE team for the media business, and I am mainly in charge of work related to MySQL. I'm not particularly struggling with the current situation, but I thought that there might be something to be gained by identifying myself as a DBRE, so I've been focusing on DBRE-like activities since this year.
Trying out working as a self-proclaimed DBRE
Aurora MySQL Upgrade Knowledge Sharing Activity
This year, I was in charge of upgrading Ameba's Aurora MySQL. Details are summarized in the following blog, so please take a look.
In order to share the knowledge gained from this upgrade with the rest of the organization, we created a Slack channel within the CyberAgent group where people can ask questions about Aurora.
Each business division and subsidiary had an SRE or a similar organization, and each was dealing with the Aurora upgrade, so this channel was used to share knowledge and provide advice.
I also posted articles about my newly acquired knowledge on the SRG Portal Blog, and have written more than 15 blog posts in the past year. Some of my articles have been included in the Hot Entries section of Hatena Bookmark, attracting the attention of many people both inside and outside the company. I hope that I have been able to contribute, even if only a little, to improving the reliability of the database.
Improving development productivity with automatic documentation of MySQL environments
Ameba adopts a microservices architecture and has a large number of microservices.
As a result, there are many MySQL clusters in operation, and the issue is that information about these clusters is not comprehensively documented.
Furthermore, even if documentation was available, it was often not updated and was out of date, which caused problems such as the time it took for new developers to onboard and catch up on new feature development.
Therefore, we have created an environment that automatically updates table information and ER diagrams of a running MySQL cluster.
The tbls config (yaml) files are managed on github, and the Aurora MySQL password is obtained from SecretsManager.
The generated html file is uploaded to S3 and users can access it via CloudFront.
A rough diagram of the configuration looks like this. Although it is not shown in the diagram, OIDC authentication is performed in CloudFront to limit which developers can access the site.
By running this daily, we can now automatically ensure that our documents always have the most up-to-date data.
Conclusion
It's been a year since I started working as a self-proclaimed DBRE, and I think I'm seeing results, albeit slowly.
There are many things I want to work on next year as well, so I would like to continue working on improving the reliability of our database and development productivity one step at a time!
SRG is looking for people to work with us. If you are interested, please contact us here.