Performance Capabilities for Cloud Data Warehouses
Service That is Easy to Use and Almost Too Good to Be True
“It’s always good if you have one less thing to worry about and more flexibility to focus on your business logic and growth.”
Data storage on the cloud is the norm nowadays for minimizing the efforts of maintaining infrastructure and databases.
Collecting data and storing it in a database is easy but not rewarding for achieving better business insights. Nowadays, businesses need their data to be streamlined for use on the go in a way that fits the business needs. After all, business intelligence and operations research is complicated and costly but rewarding.
Keeping aside the benefits that you can yield from in-house data warehouses, there are a lot of downsides to it. In-house data warehouses need a lot of work to implement, monitor, and maintain. Infrastructure and data storage costs can skyrocket if your business is growing at a rapid pace. However, recovery could be complicated if the system is too complex. You need a separate team to maintain and monitor.
Is there a better solution for this problem?
Yes! A cloud data warehouse.
Cloud data warehouses are nothing but your database hosted on the public cloud as a managed service, meant for ease of use and scalability at a relatively cheaper price. Cloud data warehouses are the viable option for hosting data that has been transformed and sorted into separate categories.
In a recent study by Denodo, it was found that 56% of organizations deploy to cloud data warehouses.
What Makes Cloud Data Warehouses a Good Fit
1. Easy Plug-and-Play Integration and Management
Today, the success of a business depends on a lot of factors. One among these factors is the ingestion of huge amounts of big data and streaming data. Depending on the business requirement, this data may not originate from a single source. Instead, you have to collect data from multiple sources and import it into the data warehouse/database.
With cloud data warehouses, you can integrate structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data from hundreds of data sources for analytical querying and ETL/ELT processes with ease.
2. Scalable by Design
Adaptability is the key to success. Adapting to new markets and demands leads you to scale your infrastructure more often than you think.
Cloud services are designed with scalability in mind. They are flexible enough to scale up and down based on the requirements.
With cloud data warehouses, you can scale on the go by adding/reducing resources.
3. Continuous Security
In-house data warehouses are more vulnerable to cyber attacks and security threats when not fortified with firewalls and services. These services again come with additional costs.
Cloud providers equip their services with security as the primary goal. Leading cloud providers can be trusted when it comes to security.
4. Instant Recovery and Backup
Failures are evident in everything. Failures can originate in literally everything: databases, business logic, infrastructure, etc. Failures should not result in loss of data and service downtime, which are crucial to a business. Having a mechanism to handle and recover from failures increases service uptime.
With an in-house data warehouse, the uptime and backup cannot be guaranteed if there is no mechanism in place to handle it.
As cloud data warehouses are hosted at multiple locations and the data is cloned, they can offer upto a 99.99% uptime and data backup guarantee.
5. Performance and Speed
Most of the time, we end up running queries and performing analyses on terabytes and petabytes of data, and regional constraints can affect the performance when serving multiple geographies. Slow outputs/results are no exception.
Performance and speed are crucial to gaining business insights quickly and earning customer loyalty and trust.
With an in-house data warehouse, there is a good chance that the processing speed or capacity might run out at times, or things might hang in between, resulting in high latency responses.
Cloud data warehouses are brilliant at quickly processing mountains of data and meeting business expectations.
6. Tunability
Cloud data providers offer numerous services. All these services come with the option to better the overall outcome by tuning the configurations.
You can configure automatic data backup, automated infrastructure provisioning, and many other features based on your business expectations.
7. Low Cost with More Benefits
Adding hardware and resources as the business grows can be costly. Moreover, hardware can get damaged or become obsolete or useless for tens of reasons.
With cloud providers, we can choose the pay-as-you-go option and only spend for the resources we use. This requires less investment on our part. Additionally, we don’t have to worry about dealing with underlying failures.
Conclusion
Cloud data warehouses are an excellent choice when price and performance are your focus areas. They use standard performance tricks like cost-based query planning, columnar storage, pipelined execution, and just-in-time compilation. As a result, scaling and saving can be high, optimization and integrations can be easy, security and recovery can be trustworthy.
