As the number of projects for developing applications increases, organizations struggle with quality assurance, release management, and infrastructure support. Provisioning an instance of a production database for a development team can take days to weeks. This time lag from the point of request to the point of provisioning depends on the size of the database, the overhead of the process, and the availability of storage. This data drift can prevent developers from using current database schemas and data in their work, which can result in suboptimal results. These inefficiencies can be significant when processes cross over organizational boundaries, and for a large number of applications and development teams. Delayed projects can lead to delays in organizational acceptance and translate into missed due dates for releases of products.

Time lags in the overall process and testing against dummy data can introduce application issues, which can negatively affect customer satisfaction. Releasing applications directly into production may not eliminate such delays. The reason is that the processes for change management can experience similar delays as each request for change can trigger legacy processes for approval and provisioning.

This whitepaper describes the challenge, DevOps, virtual databases, their benefits, and their impact.