Schedule - PGConf NYC 2025

Empowering Engineers with a Database DevOps Strategy

Date: 2025-09-29
Time: 16:00–16:50
Room: Room 4
Level: Beginner

There's no ignoring the popularity of terms like DevOps and Platform Engineering to describe high functioning technical organizations. From vision to action, we want our tools and communication channels in the business to reflect a product-first, self-service mentality; while support engineers want to ensure that resources are provisioned and managed appropriately for security, scalability, and accountability. Nowhere do these two ideals seem to come into conflict more often than with databases and other stateful stores.

Postgres is famous for its reliability and deep set of tunable parameters, but is also known among engineers as a double-edged sword… The same rich set of parameters can lead engineers to question when and which levers to pull. It seems like tuning the database will always require specialized knowledge, and results in long turnaround times when scaling, tuning, and provisioning the database.

You'll learn the core of a DevOps philosophy, and how you can embrace it to reduce barriers between the business and the engineers responsible for maintaining and supporting the data layer. And we'll discuss how and why reality sometimes falls short of the best intentions.

Speaker

Phil Vacca