How to Build Workflow-Driven Database Provisioning in Azure DevOps

You’ve convinced your team to use version control. You’re provisioning dedicated databases. But the process still feels clunky, manual, ‘scripty’, and too dependent on local setups. PowerShell helps, but it lacks consistency. And when it fails, not everyone has the time or skill to fix it.

I’ll walk you through a robust alternative: self-service database provisioning powered by automation and integrated into your team's workflow. You’ll learn how to treat your database environments as part of your platform capability, even for on-prem SQL databases.

We’ll build a setup where starting new work in Azure DevOps automatically provisions fresh databases. Need to switch focus? We’ll cover how to stash and resume your database environments without losing your place. From demo data to cleaning up stale environments, we’ll look at how to manage developer databases as part of a true Internal Developer Platform (IDP).

Expect slides, but mostly real-world code in PowerShell and YAML. You’ll leave with patterns, scripts, and a practical plan to make database delivery faster, easier, and truly self-served; laying the foundation for a lightweight IDP focused on database development.

Get a better developer experience for your team and make database delivery to them self-served!

Learn how to automate the provisioning of versioned developer databases using Azure DevOps and PowerShell Discover techniques to stash and resume active environments, improving context-switching and task flow Build specialized provisioning pipelines with PowerShell and YAML, including housekeeping strategies