FINAL WORD
Rob Mellor, VP and GM EMEA, WhereScape
finite size and power and is owned by
that organisation.
A cloud data warehouse is a flexible volume
of storage and compute power, which is
part of a much bigger public cloud data
centre and is accessed and managed
online. Storage and compute power is
merely rented. Its physical location is
largely irrelevant apart from for countries
and/or industries whose regulations
dictate their data must be stored in the
same country.
Benefits of cloud data warehouse
The benefits of a cloud data warehouse can
be summarised by five key points:
1. Access
Rather than having only physical access
to databases in data centres, cloud
data warehouses can be accessed
remotely from anywhere as well as
being convenient for staff that live
near the data centre, who can now
troubleshoot from home or anywhere
out of hours if needed. This access
means companies can hire staff based
anywhere, which opens up talent pools
that were previously unavailable. Cloud
data warehousing is self-service and so
its provision does not depend on the
availability of specialist staff.
2. Cost
Data centres are expensive to buy and
maintain. Property to store them in
needs to be properly cooled, insured
and expertly staffed, and the databases
themselves come at a huge cost. Cloud
data warehousing allows the same
service to be enjoyed, but you only pay
for the computing and storage power
you need, when you need it.
Now, with elastic cloud services such
as Snowflake, compute and storage
can be bought separately, in different
amounts. You really only have to pay for
what you’re using and you can instantly
close or downsize capabilities you no
longer need.
3. Performance
Cloud service providers compete to
offer use of the most performant
hardware for a fraction of the cost
that would be incurred to reproduce
such power on-premises. Upgrades are
performed automatically, so you always
have the latest capabilities and do not
experience downtime in upgrading to
the latest ‘version’. Some on-premises
databases offer faster performance, but
not at the cost and availability of the
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) that
cloud providers offer.
4. Scalability
Opening a cloud data warehouse is
as simple as opening an account with
a provider such as Microsoft Azure,
AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery and
Snowflake. The account can be grown
and shrunk, or even closed instantly.
Users are aware of the costs involved
before they change the amount of
computer storage they rent. This
scalability has led to the coining of the
phrase ‘Elastic Cloud’.
5. Agility
Hosting data in a cloud data warehouse
means you can switch providers if
and when it suits changes in business
strategy. Staying database-agnostic
means you have the agility to upsize,
downsize or switch completely.
Metadata-driven automation software
allows you to lift and shift entire data
infrastructures on and off the cloud
data warehouse if desired and allows
different teams within the same
company to work with the database
and hybrid cloud structure that best
suits their needs.
Choosing a cloud data
warehouse solution
A cost analysis is vital in estimating how
much money a cloud data warehouse would
save the business. Different cloud providers
have different pricing structures that
need bearing in mind. More established
providers such as Amazon and Microsoft
rent nodes and clusters, so your company
uses a defined section of the server. This
makes pricing predictable and constant, but
sometimes maintenance of your particular
node is needed.
Snowflake and Google offer a serverless
system, which means the cluster locations
and numbers are not defined and so are
irrelevant. Instead, the customer is charged
for exactly the amount of compute or
processing power it consumes. However,
in bigger companies it is often difficult to
predict the amount of users and size of a
process before it occurs. It is possible for
queries to be much bigger and cost much
more than what was expected.
Each cloud provider has its own suite of
supporting tools for functions such as data
management, visualisation and predictive
analytics, so these particular needs should
be factored in when deciding on a provider.
Using cloud-based data warehouse
platforms mean you can gather even more
data from a multitude of data sources and
instantly and elastically scale to support
virtually unlimited users and workloads.
With the ability to manage the influx of Big
Data, using automation to aid in providing
return on investment, businesses will be
able to manage the influx of Big Data,
automate manual processes and maximise
the return on cloud. •
“
YOU REALLY ONLY
HAVE TO PAY FOR
WHAT YOU’RE
USING.
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