Self-Service Datastores

The management of datastores has traditionally been handled by specialist teams, requiring significant setup and maintenance work, which can be challenging for microservices with frequent changes. To address this, the VCC technology team adopted a self-service model using automation, enabling teams to carry out many tasks themselves, such as creating and managing their own datastores, making schema changes, securing data changes, and supporting their store. This approach aims to reduce the workload of centralized teams and provide faster and less costly changes for feature teams, while focusing on higher-value tasks for the datastore team. The team has implemented a self-service strategy using automation tools, such as AWS Aurora MySQL, and is planning to add more capabilities, including secure low-friction data access and detailed query analysis, to further improve the benefits of this approach.