Achieve Infrastructure-as-Code for Databases: A Guide for Platform Engineers

The API-First Approach to Data The “Shadow IT” Antidote The Metric That Matters: 90% Faster Next Steps for Platform Engineers Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles Modernizing EDA Infrastructure: Lessons from Samsung’s VCF Deployment How to Converge a VMware vSphere Environment to VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 VCF Breakroom Chats Episode 83 – Designing Developer-Loved Platforms: What is an IDP? In the world of modern software delivery, we have successfully automated almost everything. We spin up containers in seconds. We tear down ephemeral environments with a single command. We treat compute and networking as code, defined in YAML and managed via GitOps. But then, there is the database. For too many Platform Engineers and Developers, the database remains the “last mile” problem. While your application code deploys in minutes via a CI/CD pipeline, provisioning the persistent storage required to run it often involves a context switch: logging a ticket, sending an email, or waiting for a specialized DBA to manually carve out a LUN and install an engine. This impedance mismatch—fast code, slow data—is the primary bottleneck in accelerating time-to-market. It is time to treat your data layer with the same rigor as your compute. It is time to apply Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles to your databases using VMware Data Services Manager (DSM). VMware Data Services Manager is not just a GUI for IT administrators; it was architected with an API-first mindset designed for the modern platform engineer. Running as a native Advanced Service for VMware Cloud Foundation , DSM exposes database operations—provisioning, cloning, patching, and scaling—as programmatic endpoints.