In the past year, GitHub engineers shipped GitHub Packages, Actions, Sponsors, Mobile, security advisories and updates, notifications, code navigation, and more. Needless to say, the development pace at GitHub is accelerated.
With MySQL serving our backends, updating code requires changes to the underlying database schema. New features may require new tables, columns, changes to existing columns or indexes, dropping unused tables, and so on. On average, we have two schema migrations running daily on our production servers. Some days we have a half dozen migrations to run. We’ll cover how this amounted to a significant toil on the database infrastructure team, and how we searched for a solution to automate the manual parts of the process.
At first …
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