After reading the best-selling book, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, I find that data integration plays an important role in Bill's overall IT strategy. In today's blog, let me briefly discuss how the data integration technology is used by the Unicorn project in the book, which is a significant milestone that leads to Bill's final success.
Based on the story, I draw an architecture diagram shown as follows: |
The architecture has three parts: the creation of the new database for the Unicorn project, the dev/test environment on-premises and the production environment in the cloud.
The followings are the use of the data integration technology in this project:
The followings are the use of the data integration technology in this project:
- Creating a new database by integrating data from multiple sources in real-time for the new initiative: Page 308: "The developers and Brent decided to create a completely new database,..., with data copied from not only Phoenix but also the order entry and inventory management system. ...By doing this, we could develop, test, and even run in operations without impacting Phoenix or other business critical applications. " The new Unicorn database is created by extracting live data from production systems including Phoenix project, order system, and the inventory management system. This allows Bill and his team to test out the marketing promotion from the Unicorn project without impacting the whole system.
- Creating a dev/test environment resembling the production with minimum impact: Page 304: "If we had a common build procedure, and everyone used these tools to create their environments, the developer be writing code in an environment that at least resembles the Product environment. That alone would be a huge improvement". This is also called the live Dev/Test environment. This environment needs data replication tools like Oracle GoldenGate to keep the system synchronized in real-time.
- Creating live reporting or analytic applications with the real-time production data: Page 309: The generated reports showing "customer who bought this product bought these other products." The live production data can be used to build customer intelligence applications.