16X faster deployments: EdTech giant empowers self-serve database change & compliance with Liquibase

Building self-serve IaC for database updates

The leader in EdTech turned to Liquibase to fill the gap in its otherwise streamlined IaC approach to managing cloud-based microservices. 

More than 700 developers relied on a few Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) for database updates. The slow, manual, error-prone review process stalled the pipeline for almost a week and overburdened the SREs. 

Liquibase automated and strengthened this manual process to give developers full control of their database changes with self-service workflows integrated right within their CI/CD pipeline. Within 2 months after implementation, tickets for manual changes zeroed out. Frequency and efficiency also leaped thanks to seamless integrations with GitLab and AWS Secrets Manager.  

Database DevOps automation now enables EdTech developers to deploy database change as code 16 times (or more) faster than before. Instead of processing only a few manual changes per week, the modernized workflow enables on-demand database deployments multiple times a day if needed. 

It also improves, streamlines, and simplifies SOX compliance and auditing abilities. Most importantly, those 700+ developers have a fast, secure, and reliable way to deploy database schema changes without disrupting the pipeline or burdening SREs. 

“If you build really good self-service infrastructure, teams will adopt it,” the company’s Senior Manager of CloudOps explains. 

The need to modernize EdTech data pipelines

This online education company’s SREs spent too much time managing database change tickets. The bottleneck diverted their attention from optimizing the business’s cloud infrastructure and delivering new features to remain competitive. 

The ability to update and maintain its databases is critical for an EdTech platform to effectively scale and support its millions of students. From real-time Q&A applications to in-depth online learning – plus print and digital textbooks for purchase and rental – application and database updates power every part of the business. 

Without the ability to push fast and trustworthy database updates, the EdTech company risked its industry-leading reputation for information and reliability. 

Painfully aware of the problem, the CloudOps and SRE teams joined forces to find a solution to their main challenges:

• Slow, manual deployments
• Developers’ reliance on SREs
• SOX compliance and overall governance

Digging into these issues helped pave the way for fast, secure, and scalable database change workflows.

Slow, manual database deployments take nearly a week

Every time one of 700+ developers changed database structure across any of the cloud microservices, they turned to the SRE team’s slow, manual review process. A simple database schema change took almost a week to review, test, and deploy. 

Developer experience and productivity suffered as they waited for database changes, hindering their ability to build and launch new features at a competitive pace.  

Relying on SREs for database change management

The drag of the deployment process itself was problematic, but that was amplified by the fact that it overburdened the SRE team with a constant stream of tickets. All of their workload fell to manual changes instead of infrastructure reliability, performance, and operational enhancements. 

The manual database change management process handled by SREs was a suboptimal experience for them and the developers, plus anyone else down the pipeline waiting on these changes. 

Insufficient & unreliable SOX compliance and governance

Manual processes and optimal compliance are not an ideal match. The EdTech leader’s manual database change process posed serious challenges to meeting SOX compliance as well as internal policies.  

Every change request worked its way through the SREs’ manual workflow, yet no system maintained detailed tracking for audits and compliance. With hundreds of changes requested each week, the process was prone to delays, inconsistencies, and potential human error — all increasing compliance risks and complicating auditability.

Even minor schema adjustments required extensive oversight to ensure compliance protocols were followed. The burden of checking and documenting each change to meet SOX standards not only slowed down the SRE team but also introduced a degree of unpredictability. 

Without reliable, automated tracking or governance, the company faced potential vulnerabilities in its compliance efforts, and any overlooked detail could lead to issues during a SOX audit.

Determined to modernize their cloud microservice IaC workflows, they needed to extend DevOps to the database. 

IaC environments & pipelines: AWS, MySQL, GitLab

To bring answers, education, and textbooks to millions of customers around the world, this EdTech company operates a complex cloud-based AWS (Amazon Web Services) infrastructure. It supports hundreds of microservices, each managed by the GitLab IaC pipeline that uses AWS Secrets Manager for secure access across environments. 

Their primary databases, covering 95% of their data layer, include:

• MySQL on Amazon RDS
• MySQL on Amazon Aurora

Yet they also integrate other data stores into the pipeline, including: 

• Amazon Redshift
• Amazon DynamoDB
• PostgreSQL - Amazon Aurora
• Databricks (data lakehouse)

For CI/CD orchestration and observability, they rely on tools from GitLab, Grafana, New Relic, and other leading platforms. 

Database change workflows, however, remained siloed from the efficient pipeline described above. SREs spent most of their time manually managing the ticket-based process for reviewing, testing, deploying, and documenting database updates.  

With so many manual touchpoints, time-intensive steps, and the risks of compliance enforcement, the process backlogged the SRE team, slowed down the application release schedule, and introduced concerning vulnerabilities. 

Automating change management for MySQL AWS cloud databases

Only a comprehensive database DevOps solution could take their complex and vulnerable pipeline and bring it up to modern CI/CD speed, efficiency, and security. 

After thoroughly evaluating the database DevOps landscape, The Cloud Ops and SRE team turned first to Liquibase OSS, the open-source tool that introduces automated version control with the database-as-code approach. They quickly moved into Liquibase Pro to take advantage of its advanced capabilities as well as integrations with GitLab and AWS Secrets Manager.

The nation’s biggest EdTech company chose Liquibase for its category-leading integrations, self-service deployments, and automated governance capabilities that works within their existing architecture. 

Integrating Liquibase with 60% of applications in less than a year

For the Cloud Ops and SRE teams, Liquibase Pro hit the mark on their trickiest requirements:

• Efficiently handling their massive volume of database changes
• Seamlessly integrating with existing IaC and CI/CD frameworks
• Enhancing SOX compliance while simplifying auditing

Thanks to its ease of use and integration, Liquibase automated 60% of the company’s application pipelines in less than 12 months. The process included:

• Connecting Liquibase into their GitLab pipelines and ensuring database changes flowed smoothly, effectively, and properly through the IaC workflow
• Configuring AWS Secrets Manager integration to enable quick yet secure credentials access, remaining in compliance and more secure
• Onboarding and training development teams with live sessions and documentation to outline the self-serve process without SRE intervention

In less than a year, the EdTech giant had transformed its database change process with Liquibase’s advanced database DevOps features. They streamlined their database workflows and reduced reliance on the SRE team while making compliance stronger and easier. 

Liquibase results: Accelerating database deployments by 16x

By integrating database change as code with its infrastructure as code architecture, this EdTech leader enables automated, compliant, and scalable change management to meet today’s demands and prepare for the future. 

Taking the process down from nearly a week’s worth of SRE and developer back-and-forth to merely a couple hours’ worth of self-serve management achieved 16X, or 1,500%, faster deployment speed. These efficiency gains add up to big improvements in speed and experience for developers, SREs, DevOps, and infrastructure teams.  

Self-serve changes empower developers, free up SREs

One of the most life-changing impacts of Liquibase is its empowerment of developers to self-manage their database changes – unburdening the SRE team from its endless backlog of tedious, manual, error-prone reviews. 

Instead of spending their days reviewing, changing, approving, and implementing database change requests, SREs could hand the process off to the Liquibase integration, allowing them to focus on higher-impact infrastructure tasks. 

Liquibase’s automated validation, governance, and compliance capabilities enable a self-service workflow that enhances security and safety while accelerating to maximum velocity. Developers and SREs can focus on their areas of expertise with the trust that their databases are reliably updated.  

Improving compliance and simplifying audits

These warp-speed database changes didn’t suffer the compliance challenges of the manual process, either. 

“For security, for our SOX audits, our auditors love it [Liquibase],” says the SRE overseeing the entire Western Hemisphere’s database and application pipeline trustworthiness. 

Previously, the EdTech giant’s manual workflows left room for error, making SOX compliance difficult and audits resource-intensive (and sometimes flawed). Liquibase standardized and automated compliance checks at necessary steps of the pipeline to elevate the efficacy of and confidence in overall SOX compliance as well as internal policies. 

Automated governance validated every schema change before deployment, automatically enforcing pre-configured compliance standards without requiring SRE oversight. Tracking and observability added another layer of compliance support by capturing detailed, organized records of every change. 

Ready to start your own journey to complete database change automation, governance, and observability? Get your on-demand demo of Liquibase.