Running stateful applications can provide many of the same advantages as stateless applications. In this talk, Stephen will share some thoughts on managing stateful applications as part of a CD Pipeline so that applications - and the application's data - can be versioned and deployed safely and repeatedly. This talk will discuss managing structural changes to a database as part of a CD process. The talk will dive into automation approaches and tooling for managing data migrations between environments and running database migrations within a CI/CD pipeline. The talk will feature real-world examples where we discuss specific schema migrations, their possible performance impacts and downtime implications. We will demonstrate how a complex migration can be done with 0 downtime. With AI and CI/CD we can provide something better than before: A more testable, repeatable, and open way to deploy stateful applications. This talk features a practical demo of how CD tooling can empower users to automate data migrations within Kubernetes.
Stephen Atwell develops products to improve the life of technologists. Currently, he leads Harness’s Database DevOps product. Stephen was a speaker at PASS Data Community Summit in 2025, Kubecon 2024, Postgresconf 2024, Data on Kubernetes Day in 2023, the Continuous Delivery Summit in 2022, CDCon in 2023, 2022 and 2021, and the TBM Conference in 2015. Stephen started working in IT Operations in 1998 and transitioned to developing software in 2006. Since then he has focused on developing products that solve problems he experienced in his previous roles. Stephen holds a bachelors of Engineering in Computer Science and has worn hats ranging from network administrator, to database administrator, to software engineer, to product manager. Outside of work, Stephen develops open source garden planning software (https://sourceforge.net/projects/kitchengarden2/ ). He lives in Bellevue, Washington with his wife and dog.
