Making Our Product More Reliable: How We Built a Safety Gateway for Database Updates

What’s a Database and Why Do Updates Matter?

Think of our product’s database as the master blueprint for a massive, busy building (our Aqarratti platform). This blueprint holds the location of every room, every pipe, and every wire.

Every time our team builds a new feature (like adding a new room or a new utility), we have to update that master blueprint. This update process, which we call a “migration,” is one of the riskiest things we do in engineering. If the blueprint update is done wrong, out of order, or with a typo, the entire building can stop working for everyone inside.

To protect our platform, our data, and our customers, we built a dedicated, automated “safety gateway” to manage this entire process.

The Problem: Why Manual Updates Are Risky

Before we built this system, the process for updating the blueprint had risks, many of which are common for growing tech companies:

• Human Error: When updates are run manually by different engineers, small mistakes can creep in. This is like having different construction crews using slightly different versions of the blueprint, causing mismatches between our test building and the real one.
• Sneaky Security Gaps: A simple typo in a configuration file could accidentally leave a door unlocked or a security connection weakened, and no one would know until it was too late.
• Broken Apps: Our website and mobile app teams build features based on the newest blueprint. If their app launches expecting a “new room” that hasn’t actually been built yet, their app simply breaks for customers.
• Late-Night Scrambles: We would often find these problems during a big “go-live” update. This forces everyone to scramble (often at night or on a weekend) to fix the problem and roll back the change, wasting time and delaying new features.
• No “Paper Trail”: When something went wrong, it was incredibly difficult to look back and find a clear record of what changed, when it changed, and why.

Our Solution: A New Automatic Guardian

We built a fully automated system that acts like a meticulous, security-obsessed site inspector. It is now the only way a blueprint change is allowed to happen.

Here’s what it does, in simple terms:

1. Checks All the Locks: Before starting, it creates an ultra-secure, encrypted connection to the database. It triple-checks the database’s official ID to make 100% sure we’re talking to the right one and not an imposter. This security is forced; it cannot be accidentally turned off.
2. Uses the Exact Same Toolkit: The system builds its update tools from scratch every single time, using a precise instruction list. This ensures every update is run in an identical, perfectly clean environment, removing any “it worked on my machine” problems.
3. Applies Built-in Safety Checks: The inspector scans the new blueprints for common mistakes, like a stray note, a smudged file, or files in the wrong order. If it finds anything suspicious, it stops the entire process before any damage can be done.
4. Runs the Update: Once all checks pass, it carefully and cleanly applies the new blueprint changes to the database.
5. Performs a “Smoke Test”: As soon as it’s done, the system immediately runs a simple “are you alive?” test (like flipping a light switch to see if the power is on). This confirms the database is still perfectly healthy and working after the change.
6. Prints a Receipt: When finished, the system generates a set of “receipts” for our records. This includes a unique digital “fingerprint” of the exact changes, the security certificate it used, and the successful test result.

Why This Matters (The Payoff)

This new gateway has a huge, positive impact on our entire team and product:

• We Find Errors Instantly: Problems that used to be found during a stressful launch are now caught in seconds within this safe, automated system. This saves countless hours of developer time and prevents customer-facing bugs.
• We Get a “Seal of Approval”: That digital receipt is now our proof. We can use it as a “key” to unlock the next step in a release. We can now confidently say, “Do not launch the new app update unless it matches this exact, tested, and approved database version.”
• Security is Built-In, Not an Afterthought: Our database connections are now secure by default. There is no longer room for human error to weaken our security.
• When Things Break, We Know Why: If there’s ever an incident, we have a perfect audit trail. We can see precisely what changed, when it changed, and the result, cutting our investigation time from hours (or days) to just minutes.

Our backend, website, and mobile teams can now build features with confidence, knowing the database “blueprint” will always be correct.

The Key Takeaway

This automated system isn’t just a simple script. It is a security, integrity, and reliability gateway for our entire platform. It turns the single riskiest part of releasing new features into a safe, testable, and fully auditable process that protects our product, our data, and our customers.