This article leads through generic strategies that will guide the decision making process when striving for a full lifecycle automation of on-demand provisioning a large number of data services.

Automate to a maximum! Why automate? With application platforms available where applications can be deployed and scaled within seconds, how can data services not be? Obviously, applications rely on data services and stateful data services can be vastly different.

Full Lifecycle Management Once automation has been set as a strategy, striving for full lifecycle automation is a logical conclusion. Providing fast and easy installation and initial configuration of data services is not enough. Depending on the application, the lifecycle of a data service is years long.