Reliability is not something we can just build in one place. We need to make sure all parts of the ecosystem work together to guarantee reliability everywhere. One unstable component can take down the whole system. And there is no more important component than the database. The domain model and the storage affect the whole system heavily as it affects every single operation in your application. A good product starts with a good database.

Do you rely on your monitoring solutions to let you know when things are wrong? That is so brave of you! On a more serious note, please think twice. Monitoring is not enough! It can’t explain why things happen the way they do (because it doesn’t see the past beyond metrics) and it doesn’t tell you what is going to happen (so it can’t predict the future). This is a serious problem and we need a solution (spoiler alert: we need database guardrails). Let’s read on to understand why.

We want to test early and more often. This is what shift-left refers to. Instead of testing applications just before the release, we want to test our applications early to identify issues when it’s still easy to fix them. However, shifting to the left carries much bigger consequences. Let’s see what.