## Migrations

Because we are using SQLAlchemy directly and we don't require any kind of plug-in for it to work with **FastAPI**, we could integrate database <abbr title="Automatically updating the database to have any new column we define in our models.">migrations</abbr> with <a href="https://alembic.sqlalchemy.org" class="external-link" target="_blank">Alembic</a> directly.

And it will work and will be useful **during development**.

But if your connection to the server is lost, the **running process** will probably die.

And if the server is restarted (for example after updates, or migrations from the cloud provider) you probably **won't notice it**. And because of that, you won't even know that you have to restart the process manually. So, your API will just stay dead. 😱

### Run Automatically on Startup

If in your use case there's no problem in running those previous steps **multiple times in parallel** (for example if you are not running database migrations, but just checking if the database is ready yet), then you could also just put them in each container right before starting the main process.

### Single Container