CLOUD-NATIVE SCHEMA MIGRATIONS

The idea of keeping the database schema and application code close together, and to deploy database schema changes together with application changes, seems to be accepted as best practice. Tools such as Flyway make it very easy to make schema changes, and via migration scripts to automatically upgrade your schema when you deploy the next version of your application... That's very convenient, but the big downside is that you can't downgrade the application once you have deployed it, because you already deployed the database schema changes. Also, it isn't possible to run multiple versions of the same application using the same database, which makes A/B-deployments and canary testing impossible... If you follow the following guidelines to do database schema migrations in production, you can be worry-free and benefit from the advantage of easy deployments that cloud-native environments are intended to give you.