As you already might know dbi (on a technical level) is organized into several technology divisions. Traditionally there is one for Oracle, one for Microsoft and one for Middleware products. Almost a year ago a new technology division was born to reflect the new requirements we see on the market. This does not mean that we did not provide expertise in these areas before but the goal was to more clearly organize ourself for being able to rapidly adopt new technologies and provide the best expertise for our current and future customers. In this post I’ll take a look at our Open Infrastructure Technology Division. What is it about, what do we believe in and what you can expect now and in the future.

To start with: What do we call a technology division? As the name already adumbrates it is all about technology. You could also say: The technology division are the heart of dbi. This is where people work on the different technologies, organize technical events, do researching, define and plan new workshops, adopt new products and have lots of fun. Each of these technology divisions is led by a so called technology leader who is responsible for his technology division. Currently dbi supports four of these divisions which reflect the areas we work in:

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On the top there is Hervé who is our CTO and then we have the four technology divisions:

  • We have Franck who is responsible for all aspects around the Oracle database
  • We have Stéphane who is responsible for the Microsoft stuff
  • We have Gérard who is responsible for everything around the middleware products we support
  • And finally we have the Open Infrastructure Technology Division which I am happy to represent

A very important point to notice here is that each of these divisions is cross connected to every other. We are not working in isolated silos but do work together wherever we can. Nowadays you can never be sure what happens and things have recently happened you never thought would be possible in the past, e.g.

… just to name a few. Do you know if you need a SQL Server expert on Linux tomorrow? Are you running Oracle on Windows? Are you planning to run Docker on Windows? These are just a few examples where you might need expertise which goes beyond the traditional “I only do Windows” or “I only do Oracle” way of working. This is what the technology divisions are there for: Build expertise inside the divisions but even more important build a kind of “backbone” where everyone can get help from others (inside and outside of dbi). Share what you learned, be open, be communicative, be mindful and have an open eye on what is going on around you. No matter which technology division you take: All of them share their knowledge by writing blogs, attending, organizing and speaking at events (e.g. DOAG 2016, Oracle Open World 2016, IT-Tage 2016, SWISS PGDay, PASS SQLSaturdays and many more), writing articles, creating hands-on workshops and even come together twice a year for exchanging knowledge across the technology divisions.

So far for the overview (which is far longer that it intended to be, sorry). Lets focus on the Open Infrastructure Division from now on. Probably the most important point in any division is what it stands for, so what do we stand for? As you can see from the name the word “Open” plays a central role. We do not only believe in open source software but even more important believe that being and thinking open is key to success. There are plenty of wonderful open source projects out there, each of them having an active community and each of them supporting business critical applications. Our idea is not to favor one over another but rather selecting the right technology for the right requirement. This might range from one specific product to a whole set of products. This could even result in extending (or interfacing) a proprietary solution by open source solutions when it makes sense (remember the cross connected divisions described above).

On the other hand we can not support the whole open source world because this is just not possible so we have to select a kind of technology set we want to focus on (more on that later). This set is and will be changing over time, we are absolutely aware of that. New technologies will come in, others will go out and some will stay. That’s the way of life. Important for us is the “Open Infrastructure” because when things change you need to adopt. When you keep your infrastructure open it is much more easy to adopt than when you have to adopt your closed systems. When you focus on real open standards, open formats and open software you are free to decide in which direction you want to go and even if it was the wrong decision you are not on a …

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… you are free to adjust the direction 🙂 This is more or less what we believe in and work on every day: Making infrastructures more open, easier to maintain, easier to adapt, faster to profit from and more fun to work with. Yes, work can be fun when you have the right tools and the right people to work with.

Going deeper into our division what do we actually provide? We had various internal discussion about that and it was not easy to come to a final conclusion. Indeed there is no final set or conclusion but we do provide what we call a “core” set. This are our core technologies we currently work on, provide best practices, provide trainings for (some), provide consulting (all), provide SLAs (some), implement (all) and do reviews or feasibility studies (all). So, finally here they are (bottom up):

On the Linux level:

logo_redhat logo_centos
logo_suse logo_debian logo_ubuntu

On the rdbms level:

logo_mariadb logo_postgresql logo_mysql

On the NoSQL level:

logo_mongodb logo_cassandra

On the provisioning and deployment level:

logo_ansible

On the monitoring level:

logo_nagios

On the DevOps and OpenStack level:

logo_atomichost logo_docker logo_mirantis

This are quite a few but not too much technologies. As already stated somewhere above we do not provide everything for every product but we are constantly extending our knowledge and best practices so that products might be fully supported by us in the future which are not today. Other products we are working on are not even listed above (e.g. the E(astic search) L(ogstash) K(ibana) stack). Believe me: It is really hard to select the right tools for the right job: This is what we are here for.