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 Cloud Data
Platforms
2nd Snowflake Special Edition

by David Baum

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 Cloud Data Platforms For Dummies®, 2nd Snowflake Special Edition

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 Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................ 1
About This Book.................................................................................... 1
Icons Used in This Book........................................................................ 2
Beyond the Book................................................................................... 2

CHAPTER 1: Getting Up to Speed with Cloud Data

Platforms............................................................................................. 3
Why You Need a Cloud Data Platform................................................ 4
Defining the Requirements of Modern Cloud Data Platforms........ 5
Introducing the Architecture of Cloud Data Platforms..................... 6
Staying in Front of Important Trends................................................. 7

CHAPTER 2: Leveraging the Exponential Growth

and Diversity of Data................................................................. 9
Examining the Impact of Data Silos.................................................. 10
Understanding Problems with “Stitched Together” Platforms...... 12
Reviewing the Advantages of a Unified Data Platform................... 13

CHAPTER 3: Selecting a Modern, Easy-to-Use Platform............. 15

Reviewing Your Data Needs............................................................... 16
Leveraging External Data................................................................... 17
Distinguishing Between Cloud-Washed and Cloud-Built............... 17
Insisting on a Fully Managed Cloud Service..................................... 18
Ensuring Ease of Use for the Business............................................. 20
Monitoring the Costs of Cloud Usage............................................... 20

CHAPTER 4: Accommodating Users, Workloads,

and Access Patterns................................................................. 21
Democratizing Data Access and Collaboration............................... 22
Supporting New Architectural Patterns............................................ 23
Empowering data teams with a data mesh................................ 24
Enhancing new paradigms with a cloud data platform............ 25

CHAPTER 5: Using a Cloud Data Platform to

Support Diverse Data Workloads.................................. 27
Extending Beyond Data Warehouses and Data Lakes................... 27

Table of Contents iii

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 Streamlining Data Engineering.......................................................... 28
Sharing Data Easily and Securely...................................................... 29
Developing Data Applications............................................................ 30
Advancing Data Science...................................................................... 30

CHAPTER 6: Sharing and Collaborating with Your Data............ 31

Establishing a Robust Data Sharing Architecture............................ 33
Leveraging a Data Marketplace......................................................... 34
Sharing Sensitive Data........................................................................ 36

CHAPTER 7: Maximizing Availability and Business

Continuity with a Cross-Cloud Strategy................... 37
Minimizing Administrative Chores with a Single Code Base.......... 38
Replicating Data to Improve Business Continuity........................... 40
Reacting Quickly to New Regulations............................................... 42
Accommodating Shifting Data Sovereignty Requirements............ 42
Delivering Federated Governance.................................................... 43

CHAPTER 8: Leveraging a Secure and Governed

Data Platform................................................................................ 45
Introducing Key Principles.................................................................. 45
Centralizing control....................................................................... 45
Enforcing access policies............................................................... 46
Protecting sensitive data............................................................... 47
Complying with regulations.......................................................... 48
Encrypting data.............................................................................. 49
Sharing centralized data............................................................... 50

CHAPTER 9: Achieving Optimal Performance in the Cloud..... 51

Maximizing Performance for All Data Processing Activities.......... 51
Understanding Data Integration and Performance Issues............ 53
Identifying limitations with cloud providers............................... 54
Reviewing limitations of point solutions..................................... 55

CHAPTER 10: Five Steps for Getting Started with a

Cloud Data Platform................................................................ 57
Step 1: Evaluate Your Needs.............................................................. 57
Step 2: Migrate or Start Fresh............................................................ 58
Step 3: Evaluate Solutions.................................................................. 59
Step 4: Calculate TCO and ROI........................................................... 60
Step 5: Establish Success Criteria...................................................... 60

iv Cloud Data Platforms For Dummies, 2nd Snowflake Special Edition

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 Introduction
D
ata analysts, data scientists, data engineers, and data
application developers influence critical functions
throughout the enterprise: sales, finance, supply chain,
and much more. But they often work in isolation and must con-
tend with trying to access a vast landscape of data silos.

This disparity stymies what’s possible for any organization that

wants to serve its customers and advance its business with data-
driven insights and decisions. According to a 2021 study by For-
rester Consulting titled “Unveiling Data Challenges Afflicting
Businesses Around the World,” 71 percent of businesses are gath-
ering data faster than they can analyze and use it; 66 percent say
they constantly need more data than their current capabilities can
provide; and 84 percent claim to have significant problems with
non-optimized data systems, partly due to high storage costs,
outdated IT infrastructure, and manual or slow data management
processes.

A well-architected and easy-to-use cloud data platform can

resolve these problems by providing a single source for all your
data. The platform should enable instant and near-infinite scale
and concurrency of data workloads, including data pipelines,
business intelligence, predictive analytics, and machine learning.
As a result, users should enjoy a seamless experience, even when
their data spans multiple clouds and regions. The platform should
also streamline developing and delivering data applications  —
opening new revenue streams and creating new business models.
Finally, a modern cloud data platform should give you the capa-
bility to share and monetize data across a broad business ecosys-
tem instantly and securely.

About This Book

This book explains how to establish a modern cloud data platform
that handles many types of data without incurring the excessive
cost and complexity inherent in traditional data management
solutions. Read on to learn how to:

Introduction 1

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 »» Standardize on a fully managed, usage-based data platform
that supports multiple data types.
»» Empower your data professionals to extract value from data
in ways not possible before.
»» Take advantage of baked-in data security, governance, and
resiliency that spans regions and clouds.
»» Efficiently access, share, and monetize data without copying
or manually moving data from one environment to another.
»» Implement new and changing architectural patterns such as
a data mesh or a hybrid data warehouse/data lake with a
single, flexible platform.

Icons Used in This Book

Throughout this book, the following icons highlight tips, impor-
tant points to remember, and more.

Guidance on better ways to use a cloud data platform in your

organization.

Concepts worth remembering as you immerse yourself in under-

standing cloud data platforms.

Case studies about organizations using cloud data platforms

to transform how they understand their customers and their
businesses.

Beyond the Book

If you like what you read in this book, visit www.snowflake.com to
access a free trial of Snowflake’s Data Cloud, obtain details about
plans and pricing, view webinars, access detailed documentation,
or get in touch with a member of the Snowflake team.

2 Cloud Data Platforms For Dummies, 2nd Snowflake Special Edition

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Tracking the cloud data platform’s
history

»» Defining the cloud data platform

»» Introducing basic architectural tenets

»» Understanding the need for and benefits

of a cloud data platform

Chapter  1
Getting Up to Speed with
Cloud Data Platforms

O
ver the last four decades, the software industry has pro-
duced various solutions for storing, processing, and ana-
lyzing data. These solutions made it possible to work with
traditional forms of data and newer data types generated from
websites, mobile devices, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and
data generated from other more recent technologies. Some of the
new solutions were designed to democratize access to data for the
business community, which has gradually moved data and ana-
lytics from the enterprise back office to frontline workers and the
executive suite.

The business world has learned how to put some of this data to
work in productive new ways, but many on-premises and legacy
cloud platforms weren’t architected for the variety and dynam-
ics of today’s data. Nor can those systems help you solve modern
operational needs, such as providing a single experience across
major clouds and securely sharing data globally.

Many software vendors have simply migrated their on-premises

solutions to the cloud. For the most part, these first-generation
cloud solutions provided better price and performance than their

CHAPTER 1 Getting Up to Speed with Cloud Data Platforms 3

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 on-premises cousins. However, because they weren’t built from
the ground up for the cloud, they struggled to take full advantage
of the cloud’s near-unlimited scalability and performance.

The industry has learned from the benefits and drawbacks of

these solutions and carried that knowledge forward. Each solu-
tion was a stepping stone and solved an important problem. Yet,
transforming those stepping stones into complete end-to-end
offerings that enable organizations to deliver real value from their
data continues to be a challenge.

Forward-looking organizations now seek a powerful, interoper-

able, and fully managed cloud data platform that guarantees scale,
performance, and concurrency — a platform that simultaneously
supports analytics, data science, data engineering, and data appli-
cation development, along with secure ways to share and con-
sume shared data globally from within a single, cohesive solution.

Why You Need a Cloud Data Platform

Whatever industry or market you operate in, learning how to use
your data easily and securely in a multitude of ways will deter-
mine how you run your business and how you address current
and future market opportunities. A modern cloud data platform
should easily enable you to marshal a single copy of your data
for everybody to use simultaneously, and deliver near-unlimited
bandwidth for analyzing data, sharing data, building data appli-
cations, and pursuing data science initiatives. Additionally, a
modern cloud data platform should make your business users
more efficient and help your IT team step away from tedious data
administration, so everybody can focus on delivering great expe-
riences with your data.

The most advanced cloud data platforms should enable instant

and near-infinite elasticity, delivered as a service with consistent
functionality across multiple regions and clouds. And it should
allow your organization’s business units and its business partners
and customers to share governed data securely without having to
copy the data. This versatile architecture should simplify near-
instant data sharing within and between organizations directly or
via a data marketplace, and minimize governance and compliance

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 issues by allowing everyone to rally around a single, sanctioned
copy of the data.

Defining the Requirements of Modern

Cloud Data Platforms
Whether architecting data pipelines, creating data science models,
sharing data locally or globally, or performing many other data-
intensive tasks, a modern cloud data platform must support the
many ways your organization uses data. It must deliver a superset
of capabilities to replace outdated systems, such as legacy data
warehouses and siloed data lakes, and supply a versatile founda-
tion for developing new data applications, building and deploying
machine learning models, driving powerful insights, and simpli-
fying the creation of complex data pipelines. Furthermore, the
platform must facilitate advanced data sharing relationships and
allow you to easily access commercial data sets and data services
within today’s expanding data marketplaces.

Most importantly, your cloud data platform must take full advan-
tage of the true benefits of the cloud, with an architecture based
on three key elements (see Figure 1-1).

FIGURE 1-1: The fundamental elements of a modern cloud data platform.

CHAPTER 1 Getting Up to Speed with Cloud Data Platforms 5

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 Introducing the Architecture of Cloud
Data Platforms
To best satisfy the requirements of a modern cloud data platform,
the platform should be built on a modern multi-cluster, shared data
architecture, in which compute, storage, and services are separate
and can be scaled independently to leverage all the resources of
the cloud (see the “Essential Architecture” sidebar). This archi-
tecture allows a near-limitless number of users to query the same
data concurrently without degrading performance, even while
other workloads are executing simultaneously, such as running a
batch processing pipeline, training a machine learning model, or
exploring data with ad hoc queries.

A properly architected cloud data platform offers the scale, flex-

ibility, security, and ease of use that large and emerging organi-
zations require. End-to-end platform services should automate
everything from data storage and processing to transaction man-
agement, security, governance, and metadata (data about the
data) management  — simplifying collaboration and enforcing
data quality.

Ideally, this architecture should be cross-cloud, providing a con-

sistent layer of services across regions of a single public cloud
provider and between major cloud providers (see Figure 1-2).

ESSENTIAL ARCHITECTURE
A multi-cluster, shared data architecture includes three layers that are
logically integrated yet scale independently from one another:

• Storage: A single place for structured, semi-structured, and

unstructured data types
• Compute: Independent compute clusters dedicated to each work-
load to eradicate contention for resources
• Services: A common services layer that provides a unified experi-
ence by enforcing consistent security, propagating metadata, opti-
mizing queries, and performing other essential data management
tasks

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 FIGURE 1-2: A modern cloud data platform should seamlessly operate across
multiple clouds and apply a consistent set of data management services to
many types of modern data workloads.

Built on versatile binary large object (BLOB) storage, the stor-

age layer holds your data, tables, and query results. This scal-
able repository should handle structured, semi-structured, and
unstructured data and span multiple regions within a single cloud
and across major public clouds.

The compute layer should process enormous quantities of data

with maximum speed and efficiency. You should be able to easily
specify the number of dedicated clusters you want to use for each
workload and have the option to let the service scale automatically.

The services layer should coordinate transactions across all work-

loads and enable data loading and querying activities to happen
concurrently. When each workload has its own dedicated compute
resources, simultaneous operations can run in tandem, yet each
operation can perform as needed.

Staying in Front of Important Trends

A cloud data platform should help you take advantage of several
important technology trends that have arisen as organizations
learn to leverage their data fully:

CHAPTER 1 Getting Up to Speed with Cloud Data Platforms 7

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 »» Advanced prescriptive and predictive analytics: Whereas
traditional analytic systems are reactive and backward-
looking, predictive and prescriptive systems understand the
present state or peer into the future. They recommend a
specific course of action by considering dynamically shifting
variables, such as moment-to-moment sales during a retail
promotion or campaign. Once data scientists identify the
correct algorithms and train the machine learning models,
the systems predict outcomes and prescribe a course of
action on their own — and they get smarter over time.
»» The opportunity to create new data applications: A cloud
data platform should make data application development
more accessible not just for traditional technology compa-
nies but also for any company that sees the opportunity to
offer data-driven products and services to its customers.
»» Support for modern data patterns and paradigms: The
ability to leverage new architectural frameworks beyond
data lakes and data warehouses, such as a hybrid lake-
warehouse or data mesh — a decentralized method of data
management that assigns responsibility for data to the
business teams that are closest to that data. Rather than one
monolithic system under the auspices of a centralized IT
department, a data mesh extends ownership to business
experts from throughout the organization. Each business
team leverages its domain knowledge to create data
pipelines, catalog data, uphold data privacy mandates, and
ensure data quality.
»» Easy, pervasive, and secure data sharing: A cloud data
platform should enable organizations to establish one-to-
one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships to share
and exchange data in new and imaginative ways. Secure,
governed access to a single source of data not only makes
internal teams more efficient but also facilitates collaboration
among business partners, customers, and other constituents.
»» The rise of global data networks: In every industry,
immense data-sharing networks, exchanges, and market-
places have emerged, propelling a growing data economy
and motivating business leaders to examine new data
sharing possibilities. A cloud data platform should enable
these networks with almost none of the cost, complex
procurement cycles, and delays that have plagued traditional
exchanges and other types of data sharing.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Understanding the problems with
traditional data management
approaches

»» Forming a new vision for data platforms

»» Acknowledging the limitations of data

warehouses and data lakes

»» Reviewing the advantages of a unified

cloud data platform

Chapter  2
Leveraging the
Exponential Growth
and Diversity of Data

F
irst-generation cloud data platforms can’t keep up with the
nonstop creation, acquisition, storage, analysis, and sharing
of today’s diverse data sets. Much of the data is semi-
structured or unstructured, which means it doesn’t fit neatly into
the traditional data warehouse, which first emerged more than
40 years ago. Additionally, some data types, such as images and
audio files, are wholly unstructured and must be maintained as
binary large objects (BLOBs) within an object-based storage sys-
tem that doesn’t conform to traditional data management
practices.

CHAPTER 2 Leveraging the Exponential Growth and Diversity of Data 9

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 UNDERSTANDING DATA TYPES
Most data can be grouped into three basic categories:

• Structured data (customer names, dates, addresses, order history,

product information, and so forth). This data type is generally
maintained in a neat, predictable, and orderly form, such as tables
in a relational database or the rows and columns in a spreadsheet.
• Semi-structured data (web data stored as JavaScript Object
Notation [JSON] files; comma-separated value [.CSV] files; tab-
delimited text files; and data stored in a markup language, such as
Extensible Markup Language [XML]). These data types don’t con-
form to traditional structured data standards but contain tags or
other types of markup that identify individual, distinct entities
within the data.
• Unstructured data (audio, video, images, PDFs, and other docu-
ments) doesn’t conform to a predefined data model or is not orga-
nized in a predefined manner. Unstructured information may
contain textual information, such as dates, numbers, and facts,
that are not logically organized into the fields of a database or
semantically tagged document.

Examining the Impact of Data Silos

The value of a properly architected cloud data platform can be
summed up in one word: simplicity. Many organizations have
established unique solutions for each type of data and each type
of workload: a data lake to explore potentially valuable raw and
semi-structured data as a prelude to data science initiatives, a
data warehouse for SQL-based operational reporting, or an object
storage system to manage unstructured video and image data.

They have also implemented specialized extract, transform, and

load (ETL) tools to rationalize different types of data into com-
mon formats and set up data pipelines to orchestrate data move-
ment among databases and computing platforms. As a result,
each type of data lands in a unique system, designed and modeled
for particular needs.

Multiple disconnected silos can quickly become a maintenance

and governance nightmare as users attempt to copy, move, trans-
form, and combine data to accommodate unique requirements.

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 Furthermore, many legacy systems don’t have the architec-
tural flexibility to simultaneously work with structured, semi-­
structured, and unstructured data and support the multitude of
other workloads needed to derive value, such as data engineering
pipelines and machine learning models.

These limitations motivated the formation of data lakes designed

to store huge quantities of raw data in their native formats in a
single repository. However, business users often find accessing
and securing this vast pool of data difficult, and many organi-
zations have a hard time finding, recruiting, and retaining the
highly specialized IT experts needed to access the data and pre-
pare it for downstream analytics and data science use cases. Addi-
tionally, most of today’s data lakes can’t effectively organize all
of an organization’s data, which originates from dozens or even
hundreds of data streams and data silos that must be loaded at
different frequencies, such as once per day, once per hour, or via
a continuous data stream.

Whether data from weblogs, Internet of Things (IoT) data from

equipment sensors, or social media data, the volume and com-
plexity of these semi-structured and unstructured data sources
can make obtaining insights from a conventional data warehouse
or data lake difficult. A modern cloud data platform can resolve
these limitations by storing all the data within a single, easy-
to-manage system with features that far supersede the legacy
paradigms and technologies (see Figure 2-1).

FIGURE 2-1: A cloud data platform combines the best of enterprise data

warehouses, modern data lakes, object storage systems, and cloud capabili-
ties to handle many types of data and workloads.

CHAPTER 2 Leveraging the Exponential Growth and Diversity of Data 11

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 Understanding Problems with
“Stitched Together” Platforms
Clearly, the cloud is a boon to data-intensive projects. But not
all cloud data platforms have the same pedigree. Some are built
on a cohesive architecture that takes full advantage of modern
cloud infrastructure and features inherent integration among all
platform services. Others represent “ecosystems”  — dozens or
even hundreds of “best of breed” services that weren’t initially
designed to work together.

For example, some cloud ecosystems allow you to select from

hundreds of services for acquiring, storing, processing, and ana-
lyzing unique types of data. However, each service uses a different
engine with its own access requirements, maintenance proce-
dures, and learning curve. It’s up to you to figure out how to make
them all work together. If you don’t, you will quickly find yourself
confronting some of the same data silo and data access challenges
you encountered in the on-premises world.

Consider a marketing team that wants to analyze customer buy-

ing behavior by geographic location and then feed the results to
a data science team to create customized purchase recommenda-
tions. Each team will have to use different tools and services for
each type of operation, such as feature engineering, data visu-
alization, and ad hoc analytics. First, the data engineering team
might create a data pipeline that gathers web interaction data and
turns raw latitude and longitude coordinates into ZIP codes. They
may use a specific tool to prepare data and load the data into a
repository. After that, the marketing team might use a business
intelligence service to submit queries and visualize the results
via dashboards, allowing the team to associate certain types of
behavior with certain users and regions. Finally, the data science
team may use a complementary machine learning service to build
and train a model that predicts user behavior and offers special
discounts.

Each unique activity requires a unique set of tools and may require
copying, extracting, or moving the data. The customer must fig-
ure out how to stitch it all together because these systems don’t
naturally integrate.

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 SOARING TO NEW HEIGHTS WITH
A CLOUD DATA PLATFORM
The spirit of innovation drives nearly every aspect of the business for
JetBlue, a leading airline carrier based in the U.S. In that spirit, JetBlue’s
data scientist and machine learning engineers use a cloud data plat-
form, because it gives them a one-stop-shop for all their data needs.
Airlines run on razor-thin margins. The data science team uses the
cloud data platform to discover cost efficiencies, develop great cus-
tomer experiences, and promote competitive fares, all of which
boosts revenue. Data is available 24/7, which helps JetBlue maintain
business continuity throughout the organization. Dynamic data mask-
ing allows the airline to control access to data based on roles. Near-
real time reporting enables analysts to build dashboards that allow
the operations team to make decisions as situations occur.

The data science team plans to use the cloud data platform to build
better fuel prediction models. By combining internal data with exter-
nal sources, such as air traffic control and weather, they can develop
reports and run analyses that were not possible with their traditional
data management solution.

JetBlue also uses the cloud data platform to share data with external
partners. In two minutes and with only a few clicks, the data engineer-
ing team can create a secure data sharing infrastructure that formerly
would have taken months of planning and weeks of development.

As JetBlue expands beyond its domestic roots, analysts can use the
knowledge they have gained to craft unique experiences for new cus-
tomers in new locales. As Ben Singleton, director of data science and
analytics at JetBlue, said, “We like to say that we’re a customer service
company that just happens to fly planes. Now it almost seems as
though we’re also a technology company that happens to fly planes.
The cloud data platform is a key part of making that happen.”

Reviewing the Advantages of a Unified

Data Platform
Today’s organizations want an easier way to cost-effectively load,
transform, integrate, and analyze unlimited amounts of struc-
tured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, in their native
formats, in a versatile data platform. They want to simplify and

CHAPTER 2 Leveraging the Exponential Growth and Diversity of Data 13

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 democratize access to that data, automate routine data manage-
ment activities, efficiently govern the data, and support a broad
range of data processing and analytics workloads. And they want
to do all this in one place, so they can easily obtain and share all
types of insights from all their data.

A cloud data platform will dramatically simplify your infrastruc-

ture by creating a single place for many types of data and data
workloads. For example, centralizing data reduces the number of
stages the data needs to move through before it becomes action-
able, eliminating the need for complex data pipeline tools. Reduc-
ing the wait time for data makes it possible for users to obtain
the data and insights they need, when they need them, so they
can immediately spot business opportunities and address press-
ing issues.

A cloud data platform should simplify the storage, transforma-

tion, integration, management, security, and analysis of all types
of data. It should also streamline how diverse teams share data
to collaborate on a common data set without maintaining mul-
tiple data copies or moving it from place to place. Consistent data
governance makes it easier to enforce data-access restrictions,
dictating who can see what data. Having these controls in place
improves data security and reduces risk, so all members of an
organization can work in concert to boost revenue, improve effi-
ciency, and reveal new and disruptive opportunities.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Taking stock of your data and analytic
needs

»» Staying current with the latest

functionality

»» Distinguishing between “cloud washed”

and “cloud built” data platforms

»» Reviewing the advantages of a fully

managed service

»» Unleashing a zero-maintenance platform

Chapter  3
Selecting a Modern,
Easy-to-Use Platform

O
rganizations outgrow their existing data platforms for a
variety of reasons. In many instances, limitations surface
in response to competitive threats that require the busi-
ness to acquire new types of data and experiment with new data
workloads. For example, a data science team may set out to create
a predictive analytics model that helps the sales team mitigate
customer churn. The success of this sales initiative depends on
the capability to access and iterate over the right data that best
describes customer behavior.

One new venture leads to another. In this case, based on what

the sales team learns about customer churn, the ecommerce
team may realize it needs to simplify how customers navigate
one of the ­company’s key websites. To do this properly, analysts
must look closely at the website traffic — to capture and analyze
clickstream data. This brings in another massive influx of raw,
semi-structured data.

Meanwhile, the support team wants to study social media posts

to discern trends, issues, and attitudes within the customer base.

CHAPTER 3 Selecting a Modern, Easy-to-Use Platform 15

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 This data arrives as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) in a semi-
structured format. Analysts want to visualize the analysis of this
data in conjunction with audio transcripts of customer support
calls and some enterprise resource planning (ERP) transactions
stored in a relational database, including historical data about
sales, service, and purchase history.

Finally, another division wants to display these purchase patterns

as data points on a digital map. This requires new data from a
geographic information system. Traditional data platforms can’t
keep up with the latest data engineering, data science, data shar-
ing, and other capabilities organizations need to acquire and har-
ness this new data.

Reviewing Your Data Needs

Business scenarios like these can cause an organization to look for
a more modern and versatile data platform (see Figure 3-1). Con-
sider your own needs. You may have a data platform or data man-
agement system that works well for a certain type of data, but you
want to take on new business projects that require the analysis,
visualization, modeling, or sharing of new data types. Or perhaps
you want to rethink your data acquisition strategy — to engineer
better methods for acquiring data into your platform.

FIGURE 3-1: A modern cloud data platform should be powerful, flexible, and

extensible to handle your most important data workloads.

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 While you gather additional data and the value of that data grows,
you may want to monetize that data via a data marketplace to turn
it into a strategic business asset. A modern cloud data platform
should provide seamless access to a cloud data marketplace.

Leveraging External Data

Organizations with complex IT environments and a diverse data
landscape can use a cloud data platform to leverage their data
without importing or exporting data from external repositories.
Data from various locations can be governed by a common set of
services for security, identity management, transaction manage-
ment, and other functions. These universal attributes pertain to
data stored in the platform itself and data stored in external tables,
such as an object store from one of the public cloud providers.

What are the advantages of this approach? First, all users have
a single interface for viewing and managing that data. Second,
in addition to the primary data store, the platform allows you to
access, manage, and use data in external tables (read-only tables
that reside in external repositories and can be used for query and
join operations) just as easily as you can access it from the main
platform  — and with exceptional performance. Finally, you can
leave data in an existing database or object store yet apply univer-
sal controls. This allows you to simplify your data environment by
standardizing on a single cohesive system.

Distinguishing Between Cloud-Washed

and Cloud-Built
Not all data platforms have the same pedigrees. Many began their
lives as on-premises solutions or toolkits and were later ported to
the cloud. As opposed to these cloud-washed solutions, cloud-built
platforms have been designed first and foremost for the cloud.
Cloud-built means created from the start to take advantage of the
cloud, with each cloud platform component designed to comple-
ment the others.

CHAPTER 3 Selecting a Modern, Easy-to-Use Platform 17

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 To ensure you obtain superior, cloud-built capabilities, ask your
cloud data platform vendor these questions:

»» Does the platform completely separate but logically integrate

storage and compute resources and services and scale them
independently, maximizing performance and minimizing
cost?
»» Does it easily handle a near-infinite number of simultaneous
workloads (concurrency) without degrading performance or
forcing users to contend for a finite set of resources?
»» Does the platform permit one-to-one, one-to-many, and
many-to-many data sharing relationships without requiring
people to copy or move the data?
»» Does it ensure a seamless experience across regions and
clouds?
»» Does it facilitate collaboration by data engineers, data
analysts, data scientists, and other authorized users across a
single, governed data set?
»» Can the platform perform all this automatically without the
complexity, expense, and effort of manually tuning and
securing the system?

Insisting on a Fully Managed

Cloud Service
All organizations depend on data, but none wants to be bogged
down with tedious database maintenance, system management,
and IT administration tasks. In response, a rapidly growing
industry of software vendors has emerged, offering partially or
wholly managed cloud applications and other cloud solutions.

However, not all cloud services are created equal. Most cloud ven-
dors claim to offer “managed services,” but you must dig a little
deeper to discover how much automation they actually provide.
Ideally, all aspects of managing, updating, securing, governing,
and administering your data platform should be transparent to
the business community and require no extra effort by your IT

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 professionals. Furthermore, this level of automation should be
holistic across clouds, regions, and teams, as Chapter 7 describes.

When it comes to software updates, you should always have

the latest functionality, and you should never have to endure a
lengthy, manual upgrade process. You, the customer, should not
have to plan for updates, experience downtime, or modify your
installation in any way. In the background, the cloud data plat-
form provider should take care of all administrative tasks related
to storage, encryption, table structure, query optimization, and
metadata management in order to eliminate manual tasks.

By contrast, if you layer your database and other software ser-

vices on infrastructure from one of the public cloud providers,
you’re responsible for integrating, managing, and updating all
the components.

To determine how much administration will be necessary, ask

your cloud data platform vendor these questions:

»» Do you have to set up and manage data replication, optimize

resource usage, or manually scale the system, such as
requesting an additional cluster when more compute power
is required?
»» Does the provider automatically apply software updates,
such as security patches, as soon as those updates are
available? Or, does it merely manage the underlying
infrastructure and require you to keep the software
platform up to date?
»» Does the service automatically encrypt all your data at rest
and in motion with industry-standard encryption, or do you
have to set up and apply encryption to the data manually?
Does the encryption hinder query performance?
»» Does the service scale up and out instantaneously and
elastically and then release extra compute or storage
resources when they are no longer in use? Or, do you have
to handle these tasks manually?
»» Does the cloud provider automatically replicate your data to
ensure business continuity across regions? After cross-
regional replication is established, do you have to set up
change data capture (CDC) procedures to keep multiple
databases in sync, or does the vendor handle that for you?

CHAPTER 3 Selecting a Modern, Easy-to-Use Platform 19

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 »» Do you need to partition data, tune SQL queries, and
optimize performance, or does the platform handle this
automatically?

The best cloud data platforms are fully managed services: You
click a button, and a database appears. After that, all manage-
ment, administration, scaling, tuning, and data security should
happen automatically in the background.

Ensuring Ease of Use for the Business

In addition to automating these common IT management tasks, a
modern cloud data platform should be easy for all people to use,
from business analysts to application developers to data scien-
tists. All users should be able to focus on maximizing the potential
of their data rather than managing the data platform.

With some cloud data platforms, IT is responsible for provision-

ing new resources and managing them. In other platforms, all the
infrastructure is provisioned and managed behind the scenes. You
simply run your queries or processing jobs, and the cloud data
platform does the rest, abstracting technical complexities and
automating system management activities in the background.

Monitoring the Costs of Cloud Usage

To ensure you don’t pay for more capacity than you need, your
cloud data platform should also offer usage-based pricing in con-
junction with built-in resource monitoring and management fea-
tures that provide complete transparency into usage and billing,
with granular chargeback capabilities tied to individual budgets.
Integrated usage tracking by time or by accumulated use allows
you to administer cost allocations and chargebacks easily.

Finally, the platform should employ safeguards to eliminate run-

away usage. For example, auto suspend and auto resume features
automatically start and stop resource accounting when the plat-
form isn’t processing data. You should also be able to set specific
time-out periods for each type of workload.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Recognizing how today’s workers
use data

»» Democratizing data access and

collaboration

»» Supporting new architectural paradigms

and access patterns

Chapter  4
Accommodating Users,
Workloads, and Access
Patterns

T
oday, nearly every worker consumes data on some level.
Everybody is a data consumer, but each person has different
data requirements.

For example, managers, supervisors, and line-of-business (LOB)

workers generally want data delivered within the context of the
business processes they use daily, and in a form they can read-
ily understand. They want to visualize data via intuitive charts
and graphs, ideally displayed via easy-to-use apps on computers,
tablets, and phones.

Analysts are better equipped to sort, summarize, and manipulate

data. Many have been trained to use business intelligence apps,
load data into spreadsheets, create pivot tables, and generate cus-
tom reports. They’re comfortable creating data models, joining
tables, and imposing a sensible structure on a data set. They’re
familiar with using SQL to create and issue queries.

CHAPTER 4 Accommodating Users, Workloads, and Access Patterns 21

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 Data scientists leverage massive data sets to build, train, and deploy
machine learning models. They consolidate, cleanse, and trans-
form data to fuel their models. To deliver new value and unlock
new business opportunities, they create predictive and prescrip-
tive analytics.

Data engineers build data pipelines and use various tools to popu-
late databases in real time or batch mode and refresh those data-
bases at periodic intervals. They are also responsible for cleansing
data to eliminate duplications, correct inaccuracies, and resolve
inconsistencies, often by incorporating input from analysts and
LOB managers. Finally, data engineers handle data transforma-
tion projects, such as converting data from one format or struc-
ture into another format or structure.

Software developers and DevOps professionals develop and deploy

data-driven applications for internal use and to create products
for external customers. These technology professionals collect
data and apply it to unique business problems. They also collect,
analyze, and maintain the data the applications generate.

Data architects are tasked with delivering the right tools and infra-
structure to make all these teams productive while helping to
establish and enforce data security and data governance needs.

Democratizing Data Access

and Collaboration
All of these workers want to access relevant data as soon as it is
needed — to obtain the right data at the right time. To make this
possible, a cloud data platform must be optimized to provide
near-real time access to an ever-growing collection of diverse
data. Business professionals, data analysts, data engineers, data
scientists, and application developers need to confidently work
with the same single source of data to ensure consistent out-
comes, and collaborating on this unified data set should be easy.

As organizations enable this level of collaboration, they need to

find ways to eliminate duplicate efforts. The right cloud data plat-
form makes this experience possible by alleviating disconnected
data silos and discouraging data copying. Users should be able to
leverage the data simultaneously without importing or exporting
that data from one system to another.

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 This is a sharp contrast from legacy data platforms, which are
restricted by a linear data processing architecture. These older
platforms are limited in the scale and number of multiple work-
loads they can run in parallel, leading to long wait times or failed
jobs for resources and data-driven insights. Furthermore, because
they’re typically optimized for a particular type of user or work-
load, organizations often end up with unique data silos for each
unique situation.

Figure  4-1 shows that a flexible cloud data platform accommo-

dates all these users and workloads. It supports advanced ana-
lytics and machine learning along with traditional business
intelligence (BI) and data visualization. It offers all the capabilities
that organizations derive from data warehouses and data lakes. It
also facilitates modern data sharing relationships and empowers
developers to create and maintain data applications.

FIGURE 4-1: A cloud data platform should handle any data source and data
workload and serve data consumers of all levels and needs.

Supporting New Architectural Patterns

New types of data often necessitate new architectural patterns,
some of which you can’t foresee in advance. A modern cloud
data platform enables these architectural patterns to change and
evolve according to your business needs. For example, a tradi-
tional data warehouse may evolve into a hybrid pattern that
combines the best attributes of data warehouses and data lakes.
Domain-specific data marts might evolve into a more manage­
able, better-governed data mesh. You need a cloud data platform
to facilitate all these patterns based on some key architectural
principles described below.

CHAPTER 4 Accommodating Users, Workloads, and Access Patterns 23

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 Empowering data teams
with a data mesh
A data mesh is a design pattern for organizing data and help-
ing domain teams gain access to that data. The basic premise is
to divide large, monolithic data architectures into smaller func-
tional domains, each managed by a dedicated team. The teams
closest to the data are responsible for developing and managing
the data products they use and that serve the business, including
building and maintaining the data pipelines, implementing gov-
ernance policies, and extending access to others who can benefit
from that access.

This new architectural paradigm arose to remedy the limitations,

delays, and expertise required of traditional data warehouses and
data lakes, which tend to combine lots of data from lots of depart-
ments into a monolithic system managed by a central team.

DATA MESH ARCHITECTURAL

PRINCIPLES
Four primary principles underlie today’s emerging data mesh archi-
tectures that help users gain the most value from their data (see the
accompanying figure, which shows the four core principles of a data
mesh architecture):

• Principle 1: Domain-centric ownership and architecture.

A data mesh shifts the responsibility of data ownership into the
hands of specialized teams. Domain teams control all aspects of
the data as well as create and share analytics with other teams.
From ensuring they have the right sources to building and main-
taining data pipelines to enforcing data quality, the people who
best know the data take charge of putting it to work.
• Principle 2: Data as a product. Domain teams aren’t just respon-
sible for the data; they are also responsible for developing and
maintaining useful data products. For example, a supply chain
team might create an inventory data product that a marketing
team can tap into to develop new discount campaigns. Likewise, a
finance team can design and share revenue products with data
science teams.

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 • Principle 3: Self-service infrastructure as a platform. A data
mesh eliminates complex technologies and the need for niche
skills. The right cloud data platform supports a consistent set of
tools and capabilities that allow domain teams to build, serve, and
utilize data products without getting bogged down managing
hardware and software or scaling infrastructure.
• Principle 4: Federated governance. Strong access controls and
data protections are implemented by each domain team, mitigating
risks while enforcing data privacy and compliance as new products
are developed for sharing data. These governance policies should
be centrally managed and interoperable across the business.

Enhancing new paradigms

with a cloud data platform
Even when you follow these modern design principles, a data mesh
runs the risk of turning into domain-specific silos. A cloud data
platform allows data teams to leverage relevant data when they need
it without creating new silos or increasing operational complexity.
The entire organization can securely share a single copy of data that
all authorized users can discover and access immediately. People
throughout the enterprise can easily access and query the data with-
out having to move or copy it. All data is live and instantly accessible,
and all updates are automatically propagated to other teams.

The best cloud data platforms can connect domain teams across
regions and clouds, as Chapter 7 discusses. Each domain team can
operate locally, running on its preferred cloud or region. Whether
the teams work in SQL, Java, Scala, or Python — or utilize a mix of
languages and techniques — the cloud data platform should easily
support them. They can share data and data products as easily with
a domain team on the other side of the world as they can with a team
in the same office. And the organization can replicate data between
regions and between multiple public clouds to operate without dis-
ruption, ensuring business continuity, allowing for regional data
sovereignty differences, and upholding regulatory protections.

CHAPTER 4 Accommodating Users, Workloads, and Access Patterns 25

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 When anchored by a modern cloud data platform, a data mesh
can incorporate many types of data (structured, semi-structured,
and unstructured) and file formats, and support access to external
data for comprehensive coverage of the data landscape. IT teams
don’t need to worry about provisioning, maintenance, upgrades,
or downtime. Domain teams operate as distinct units and can
scale their data products to other teams, requiring no infrastruc-
ture expertise or database tuning.

BETTER DATA ENGINEERING

YIELDS BETTER INSIGHTS
Vimeo is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that provides
­professional-quality video for more than 200 million users. Vimeo
ingests and analyzes large amounts of customer, marketing, and
product-usage data to surface data-driven insights that support
customer acquisition and upsell initiatives. Unfortunately, data
engineering challenges and time-consuming system maintenance
diverted attention from higher-impact initiatives.

Realizing the need for a new data environment, Vimeo subscribed

to a cloud data platform to ingest fresh data directly from Vimeo’s
production databases. A Kafka connector simplifies the process of
ingesting billions of streaming video events per day. These new data
pipelines have reduced latency for reports that aggregate data from
Salesforce, Amplitude, Google Analytics, and content delivery net-
work (CDN) vendors.

The cloud data platform also increases Vimeo’s ability to make data-
driven decisions. Ingesting enriched data from no-code sales and
marketing platform Openprise provides valuable insights about
­enterprise-level customers. Integrating with customer data platforms
Singular and Simon Data enables a data enrichment process that
helps marketers refine Vimeo’s customer acquisition models. Best of
all, Vimeo’s data platform can support new data-driven initiatives.

Overcoming data engineering challenges has freed Vimeo’s technical

staff to focus on innovation and helped the company to reimagine its
extract, transform, and load (ETL) practices. The cloud data platform fea-
tures a multi-cluster shared data architecture that scales instantly to han-
dle more data, users, and workloads. A near-zero maintenance
infrastructure has improved uptime, reduced system administration, and
eliminated concerns about stability. As a result, Vimeo can now run more
queries, ingest more data, and create more business opportunities.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Broadening analytics initiatives

»» Creating more versatile data lakes

»» Streamlining data engineering tasks

»» Sharing and collaborating with data

»» Developing new data applications

»» Fostering the work of data scientists

Chapter  5
Using a Cloud Data
Platform to Support
Diverse Data Workloads

A
cloud data platform should maximize the value of your
data. It should bring together modern technologies for
storing, sharing, and analyzing that data; creating modern
data pipelines; building new data applications; and delivering
cutting-edge data science and predictive analytics projects. A
modern cloud data platform can power, scale, automate, and
improve these important workloads.

Extending Beyond Data Warehouses

and Data Lakes
A cloud data platform should establish a single source of data for
a virtually limitless scaling of workloads and users. You should
be able to use ANSI SQL to manipulate all data, including support
for joins across data types and databases, as well as use mod-
ern programming languages, such as Java, Scala, and Python. The
data platform should offer a superset of the best capabilities of

CHAPTER 5 Using a Cloud Data Platform to Support Diverse Data Workloads 27

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 data warehouses, data lakes, and more. In addition, a cloud data
platform should:

»» Simplify management, eliminating administrative chores

such as tuning queries, installing security patches, scaling
workloads, and replicating data
»» Maximize data options, allowing users to access near-­limitless
amounts of structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data
(including JSON, XML, and AVRO) to build data applications,
launch data science initiatives, and extract timely insights
»» Power all users and workloads, enabling many concurrent
users and multiple applications to simultaneously access the
data without degrading performance
»» Minimize usage costs, separately scaling storage and compute
resources to facilitate instant, cost-efficient scalability and allowing
users to pay only for what they use in per-second increments

These attributes make a cloud data platform an ideal architecture

on which to deploy the best of a data lake and data warehouse in one
solution. You can tap into the massive scale necessary to bring all
data together without compromising on performance. Additionally,
you can use the platform to augment and connect data siloed in other
systems to accelerate data transformations and analytics. Having
flexible access via SQL and other popular languages makes build-
ing data pipelines, running exploratory analytics, training machine
learning (ML) models, and performing other data-­intensive tasks
easy for many types of users working across shared data.

Organizations with traditional data lakes can extend these assets

by using a cloud data platform as the single source of data. Hav-
ing a multi-cluster, shared data architecture yields dramatically
better performance than traditional alternatives. Finally, when
anchored by a cloud data platform, data can be more carefully
governed, which Chapter 8 discusses.

Streamlining Data Engineering

Traditional data pipelines are often developed using legacy extract,
transform, and load (ETL) procedures that may slow down or even
fail as data volumes spike. They are often too rigid to accommo-
date evolving needs and dependencies, such as modifications to
the data model; data cleansing requests from downstream users;
or new data types, such as machine-generated data from Internet
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 of Things (IoT) systems, streaming data from social media feeds,
JSON event data, and weblog data from Internet and mobile apps.

To accommodate newer forms of data and enable more timely

analytics, modern data engineering workloads rely on the superior
processing capabilities of a cloud data platform. With older data
platforms, transformation jobs contend for resources with other
workloads running on the same infrastructure. Modern cloud data
platforms move the transformation process to the cloud, enabling
superior scalability and elasticity. This allows data engineers to
create data pipelines that extract and load raw data and trans-
form it later, once the requirements are understood — a strategy
known as ELT rather than ETL.

Thanks to the versatility of these modern data transforma-

tion workflows, data engineers can create stable, scalable data
pipelines to incorporate all types of data, accommodate emerg-
ing business requirements, and use popular languages and tools.
When based on a fully managed cloud service, these modern data
pipelines automate many of the management, maintenance, and
provisioning challenges of traditional pipeline infrastructure.

Sharing Data Easily and Securely

A cloud data platform should enable organizations to share slices
of their data easily and receive shared data in a secure and gov-
erned way — without requiring constant data movement or man-
ual updates to keep data current. Authorized members of a cloud
ecosystem should be able to tap into live versions of the data.
Rather than physically transferring data to internal or external
consumers, the platform should enable instant access to governed
portions of live data sets.

This type of advanced data sharing encourages collaboration

by making it easier to broadly share data across business units,
with an ecosystem of business partners, and with other external
organizations.

A cloud data platform also allows you to more easily monetize

your data to create new revenue-generating products and ser-
vices. Because data isn’t copied or moved in these scenarios, you
eliminate the cost, headache, and delays associated with tradi-
tional data exchanges and marketplaces, which deliver only stale
subsets or “slices” of data that must be continually refreshed.
Consult Data Sharing For Dummies for additional details.

CHAPTER 5 Using a Cloud Data Platform to Support Diverse Data Workloads 29

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 Developing Data Applications
Today, nearly every company sees the value of leveraging data to
develop new insights and share them with customers and part-
ners, opening up new revenue streams and powering new lines of
business. A cloud data platform masks DevOps complexity, so you
can focus on creating innovative data applications. For example,
a cloud data platform eliminates the need to build infrastructure
and automatically handles provisioning, availability, tuning, data
protection, and other operations. Developers can instantly spin up
dedicated compute resources to support a near-unlimited number
of concurrent users and workloads without requiring a dedicated
engineering team to prepare the data. Operations and quality-
assurance (QA) professionals can utilize DevOps workflows to:

»» Create instant sandboxes with zero-copy cloning and

isolated computing resources
»» Access historical data or roll back to a previous version
without manual backups
»» Improve operational efficiency with built-in high availability,
data durability, and disaster recovery utilities

Advancing Data Science

Data scientists need data to build and train ML models and pre-
dictive applications. The better the data, the better the outcomes.
Finding, retrieving, consolidating, cleaning, and loading training
data takes up an inordinate amount of a data scientist’s time.

A modern cloud data platform should satisfy the entire data life-
cycle of ML, artificial intelligence, data visualization, predictive/­
prescriptive analytics, and application development. It should con-
solidate data in one central location for easy development and flex-
ible accessibility via a wide range of data science notebooks and
AutoML tools. It should also natively support the most popular lan-
guages, including SQL, Java, and others. These capabilities enable
data scientists to develop and deploy new models with less time
spent on data preparation.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Establishing a robust and efficient data
sharing architecture

»» Leveraging a data marketplace

»» Controlling access to sensitive data while

maximizing its usefulness

»» Guaranteeing transactional integrity

Chapter  6
Sharing and
Collaborating with
Your Data

A
ccording to a 2020 Forrester Research report titled “The
Insights Professional’s Guide to External Data Sourcing,”
47 percent of organizations currently commercialize their
data, while 76 percent have launched, or plan to launch, initia-
tives for improving their external data sourcing. A cloud data
platform should revolutionize these endeavors by easily enabling
modern and secure data sharing without requiring organizations
to move or copy the data.

This is in stark contrast to traditional data sharing approaches, in

which data providers simply copy and send some or all of a primary
data set to data consumers. Within these traditional data sharing
scenarios, data is often copied via File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
or an application programming interface (API) that links the two
systems. In some instances, special data pipelines move the data
via extract, transform, and load (ETL) procedures that extract data
from the provider’s database, transform it into a format suitable
for consumption, and then load it into the consumer’s database.

CHAPTER 6 Sharing and Collaborating with Your Data 31

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 Newer data sharing methods use cloud storage services to stage
data to a central location that authorized consumers can access.

However, within all these scenarios, disparities arise between the

primary data set owned by the data provider and the secondary
data set used by data consumers, requiring constant update pro-
cedures to keep the two versions in sync. Traditional data sharing
methods are slow, cumbersome, costly, and create secondary data
silos that quickly become dated or “stale,” as Figure 6-1 illustrates.

FIGURE 6-1: Traditional data sharing methods hinder organizations from

extracting fresh insights from data that is always live and up to date.

Instead, a data provider can use a cloud data platform to provide

data consumers access to live, read-only data that doesn’t move
via modern cloud data sharing. The data can be shared across
cloud providers and regions without using ETL or other traditional
procedures. The data is updated automatically — decreasing man-
agement overhead for both the data provider and data consumer.

When sharing live, read-only data, a data consumer can easily

access and integrate the shared data set without changing the
data provider’s original version. When the provider updates the
data set, the data consumer’s read-only version is updated almost
simultaneously (see Figure 6-2).

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 FIGURE 6-2: A modern cloud data platform enables live, governed data to be
shared across clouds and regions without needing to move files across
environments or create unnecessary copies.

Establishing a Robust Data Sharing

Architecture
A modern cloud data platform should allow you to provide on-
demand access to ready-to-use, live data inside a secure, governed
environment. This will enable you to share data easily among
multiple business units across your organization and seamlessly
exchange data with your business partners, customers, and other
entities within your business ecosystem. This all happens without
copying or moving data, and with everybody leveraging the same
single copy of data.

Sharing data internally among departments and subsidiar-

ies should be just as easy as sharing it externally with partners,
suppliers, vendors, and even customers. With a modern cloud
data platform, all database objects are centrally maintained and
updated in conjunction with end-to-end security, governance,
and metadata management services. As a result, you don’t have to
link applications, set up complex procedures, or use FTP to keep
data current. And because data is shared rather than copied, no
additional storage is required (see Figure 6-3).

CHAPTER 6 Sharing and Collaborating with Your Data 33

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 FIGURE 6-3: A cloud data platform streamlines data sharing between data
providers and data consumers, even across multiple regions and clouds.

This modern data sharing architecture lets you share subsets or

“slices” of your data. It also allows you to share business logic,
such as user-defined functions (UDFs) written in multiple proce-
dural languages. As with sharing data and metadata, these shared
functions uphold previously defined governance and security
controls.

Rather than physically transferring data, models, and functions

to internal or external consumers, you can authorize those con-
sumers with read-only access to a governed portion of a live
data set, accessible via SQL and a variety of other languages or
analytic tools. As a result, a near-infinite number of concurrent
consumers can access shared data and logic without competing
for resources. Additionally, performance is exceptional due to the
cloud’s near-limitless storage and compute resources.

A cloud data platform should facilitate modern data sharing by

enabling authorized members of a cloud ecosystem to access live,
read-only versions of the data. If you don’t have to track data in
multiple places, controlling what the data includes and updating
the data becomes easy. So does monitoring who interacts with it.

Leveraging a Data Marketplace

Modern data sharing technology also sets the stage for collabo-
rating and monetizing data via data marketplaces — online com-
munities that facilitate the purchase and sale of data and data
services. It’s a burgeoning opportunity: Thousands of online
marketplaces today link buyers and sellers. Typically, the data

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 provider handles data transformation, preparation, copying, and
loading, while the marketplace oversees discovery, collabora-
tion, licensing, and auditing. These are onerous tasks for the data
provider, requiring complex data pipelines and constant update
procedures that often leave the consumer with stale data. With
a modern cloud data platform that replaces those manual mar-
ketplace tasks, data providers can share and monetize their data
much more easily.

Some data providers share data. Others also share data services
that put that data to work. For example, an organization might
supplement its internal customer data with third-party data to
better understand the age and income of groups that have pur-
chased from its website. The same organization might subscribe
to a data service that cross-references online purchase behavior
with additional third-party demographic data, enabling a more
personalized understanding of each group or segment.

A cloud data platform should make it easy to join a data market-

place or establish your own data exchange that enables an eco-
system of your business partners, for example, to share data and
data services collaboratively. The platform should also include
user-friendly search and discovery tools to make it easy for users
to identify pertinent marketplace services and easy for data pro-
viders to promote their services. Thus, each marketplace partic-
ipant can easily offer and acquire new data sets for exploration,
analysis, and other tasks, and use a wide range of data services to
add value to that data.

For example, a financial services company can examine ecom-

merce data sets to identify fraudulent transactions. A telecommu-
nications company can sell location data to help retailers target
consumers with ads. Consumer packaged goods companies can
share purchasing data with online advertisers — or directly with
customers. A logistics company might sell data about transporta-
tion patterns and shipping activity as an indication of economic
trends.

A cloud data platform streamlines the entire process of acquir-

ing, merging, enriching, and sharing data and data services. It’s
not just a network of organizations but also a network of con-
tent that includes data, logic, and applications. These capabili-
ties are especially helpful to data scientists, who often acquire
third-party data sets to expand their analyses and enrich their
predictive models.

CHAPTER 6 Sharing and Collaborating with Your Data 35

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 With modern data sharing technology, a data provider can easily
grant access to the data it wants to share with its intended mar-
ketplace consumers without managing cumbersome data pipe-
lines. End-to-end security, multiparty governance, and metadata
management services are systematically applied, even when the
data consumers span multiple clouds. With updates made auto-
matically, you don’t have to link applications, set up file-sharing
procedures, or frequently upload new data to keep data current.

Sharing Sensitive Data

If portions of a database table are subject to strict security and
confidentiality policies, sharing the entire table would expose that
sensitive data. Therefore, to minimize the chance for unauthor-
ized access, your cloud data platform should offer flexible options
for securing data.

For example, large companies may store aggregated advertising

data in a clean room to help businesses better understand their
advertising data. Data clean rooms have stringent privacy controls
that don’t allow businesses to view or pull any customer-level
data and yet still infer trends from the aggregate data, such as
how many customers purchased particular products after viewing
an ad for those products.

Sometimes you need to fully mask or “lock down” the data; at

other times, you need to anonymize certain fields, rows, or col-
umns to allow people to analyze the data without seeing the
sensitive elements. A cloud data platform allows organizations
to use this aggregated data and combine it with their own with-
out exposing sensitive user-level data. Choose a modern cloud
data platform that allows data providers to easily control access
to individual database tables with granular protections, such as
secure views, which Chapter 8 discusses.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Ensuring worldwide business continuity

»» Implementing the right clouds for the

right locales

»» Establishing global data replication to

ensure data protection and availability

»» Complying with data sovereignty

regulations

»» Simplifying administration by using a

single code base for multiple clouds

Chapter  7
Maximizing Availability
and Business Continuity
with a Cross-Cloud
Strategy

L
arge organizations commonly rely on multiple on-premises
data repositories while also storing data in one or more pub-
lic clouds. This diverse software-solutions landscape invari-
ably spawns diverse data sets, such as data warehouses populated
with data from enterprise applications, data lakes for exploratory
analysis, and a wide assortment of local databases, data marts,
and operational data stores for local and departmental needs.

Organizations have been working for years to eliminate these

silos  — first arising from countless on-premises systems and
now compounded by a plethora of cloud-based applications. As
these organizations expand, they often become dependent on new
sets of silos in various regions and across different clouds, mak-
ing it difficult to use all data fully.

CHAPTER 7 Maximizing Availability and Business Continuity with a Cross-Cloud Strategy 37

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 Furthermore, each public cloud provider has different levels
of regional presence, and data sovereignty requirements may
require organizations to keep data processing operations within
the regions they serve, leading to even more silos. Each depart-
ment and division within your organization may have unique
requirements. Rather than demand that all business units use the
same cloud provider, a multi-cloud strategy allows each unit to
use the cloud that works best for that unit.

This is a strategic advantage for global companies because not

all cloud providers offer the same services or operate in the geo-
graphic regions where your data and users reside. It’s also useful
if you acquire or merge with a company that has standardized on
a cloud different from the one you’re using, because it enables
teams from various business units to collaborate without first
undergoing a lengthy migration to a single, standard cloud.

Your cloud data platform should allow you to easily operate data
workloads among multiple clouds and multiple regions within
each cloud, so you can locate data where it makes sense and mix
and match clouds as you see fit.

This type of deployment flexibility assists with geographic

expansion, streamlines business development, improves avail-
ability, and allows you to use different cloud services in different
regions — without wrestling with the unique nuances of admin-
istering each cloud. The cloud data platform should deploy the
same code base that spans them all to deliver a consistent, uni-
fied experience regardless of region or cloud. This also enables
you to host data seamlessly and securely while selecting the cloud
options that best meet your needs.

Minimizing Administrative Chores with a

Single Code Base
When working with multiple clouds, how do you ensure the same
security configurations, administrative techniques, analytics
practices, and data pipelines apply to all your cloud providers? For
example, will you have to resolve differences in audit trails and
event logs? What about tuning and scaling techniques on differ-
ent clouds? Will your IT security experts have to deal with varying
sets of rules on each cloud or work with multiple key management

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 systems to encrypt data? Will data engineers have to create unique
pipelines? Will data scientists encounter obstacles when building
machine learning models from multiple data sets?

Your cloud data platform should provide a unified experience

across multiple cloud providers to ensure data management con-
sistency and to simplify administrative operations. Abstracting
the differences among clouds means you won’t need to hire peo-
ple with unique skill sets or maintain familiarity with each public
cloud. Here are a few terms to be aware of:

»» Multi-cloud means your platform operates on several

clouds — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and
Google Cloud Platform — and their regions.
»» Cross-cloud means you can instantly and consistently access
data from all these clouds and their regions and replicate
and share data seamlessly between them.
»» Data replication is the process of replicating data in more
than one region or cloud. This can be to make data available
to other parts of the business, ensure your business remains
operational in the event of a failure or outage, or meet
regulatory compliance requirements.

The platform experience should be the same no matter where your

data resides, even as you uphold geo-residency requirements and
comply with data sovereignty mandates. For example, analysts
can query data housed in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft
Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, using the same procedures.

The best cloud data platforms enforce data access, security,

and governance policies that “follow the data,” not only across
regions but also across clouds. A shared metadata layer can define
a cohesive set of network services to orchestrate data manage-
ment and uphold all data protections and controls. Therefore, all
users obtain consistent results, and all workloads enable consis-
tent outcomes.

This is a boon to administrators because they don’t have to learn

each cloud provider’s distinct data access and data governance
policies. And because the data doesn’t have to be moved among
systems, administrators achieve stronger data security and pri-
vacy levels, with better end-to-end visibility for compliance. No
matter where that data lives, no matter where it’s being accessed,

CHAPTER 7 Maximizing Availability and Business Continuity with a Cross-Cloud Strategy 39

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 administrators can easily control how the information is pro-
tected and ensure that all data-access constraints are consistently
enforced.

This same logic pertains to data security and governance: There

is no need to set up different policies for each cloud because the
cloud data platform spans them all. Data stewards can set up all
necessary roles, permissions, masks, and controls — ­irrespective
of which clouds their teams use. All constraints, controls, and
views will be consistently enforced.

These same cross-cloud administrative capabilities also simplify

software development and maintenance activities for DevOps and
DataOps teams. For example, rather than creating three versions
of a software application for the three major clouds, a software-
as-a-service (SaaS) provider can create one data app that runs on
all of them.

Replicating Data to Improve

Business Continuity
Business continuity involves planning for disruptions, whether
those disruptions stem from an extreme weather event, a cyber-
attack, or an internal mishap. All businesses that depend on data
need a business continuity strategy to mitigate these situations
and a recovery plan to make sure the business can resume normal
operations. An essential part of these continuity plans involves
data replication, the process of automatically copying data to mul-
tiple locations to ensure it’s protected and always available and
automatically up to date in the event of a regional outage.

Ideally, data should be replicated to more than one region or cloud

to ensure all parts of the business have the data they need, that
the business can quickly resume normal operations, and that the
enterprise complies with corporate compliance requirements
governing the security and sustainability of data throughout its
lifecycle.

Cross-cloud data replication is essential for business continuity

and point-in-time consistency between primary and secondary
sites. In case of a mishap, it enables you to instantly failover  —
switch to an up-to-date copy of the data in another region or

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 cloud — or restore previous versions of a table or database within
a specified retention period. This strategy ensures that your busi-
ness won’t be disrupted, and you’ll minimize data loss.

Most importantly, data replication procedures should be com-

pletely automated to remove the risk of manual errors or delays.
Furthermore, a complete data-retention and business continu-
ity strategy should go beyond duplicating data within the same
cloud region or zone. Instead, it should replicate that data among
multiple availability zones for geographic redundancy and even
between multiple clouds.

At first glance, this may appear to negate the centralized “single

source of data all in one place” strategy advocated throughout
this book. It doesn’t. That’s the beauty of automatic data repli-
cation within the context of a cloud data platform: Although your
data is mastered, managed, and governed in only one location, by
domain-centric data stewards and teams, it can be maintained
in multiple availability zones or clouds for disaster recovery pur-
poses. A modern cloud data platform needs to support this and
apply end-to-end security, governance, and metadata manage-
ment services. It’s all synchronized by the platform, with central-
ized command and control based on these fundamental principles.

A complete and modern cloud data platform should automati-

cally replicate databases and keep them synchronized across
regions and clouds, boosting availability, automating the failover
of workloads, and guaranteeing instant access and recovery for
databases of any size (see Figure 7-1).

FIGURE 7-1: A modern cloud data platform automatically replicates databases

and keeps them synchronized across regions and clouds.

CHAPTER 7 Maximizing Availability and Business Continuity with a Cross-Cloud Strategy 41

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 Reacting Quickly to New Regulations
Cross-cloud deployment has become increasingly pertinent as
data privacy regulations become more restrictive in Europe and
elsewhere. In some instances, sudden and sweeping changes to
data privacy laws may force you to reconsider which cloud pro-
vider you use.

Similarly, you may encounter a competitive situation that moti-

vates you to move your operations off a particular cloud. Amazon,
Google, and Microsoft all have extensive and diverse operations.
How will you react if you have standardized on one of these
cloud platforms, and the vendor later launches a new business
or acquires a new company that presents a competitive threat?
Rather than support that cloud vendor’s business, you may opt to
shift your data and workloads to a different cloud provider.

A modern cloud data platform should make it easy to move your

operations between clouds. It should securely govern data stored
in multiple clouds and across various regions worldwide.

Accommodating Shifting Data

Sovereignty Requirements
Some industries, such as healthcare and financial services, uphold
data sovereignty requirements that mandate you keep data in the
same locale in which it is generated. If your platform supports
seamless data portability, you’ll have an easier time complying
with regulations. A modern cloud data platform should give you
the flexibility to select the cloud provider with the best offering
and strongest regional presence. It should also allow you to rep-
licate portions of a data set and enable fine-grained control over
where those portions are located so that you can put precisely the
right data into the hands of the teams that need it.

Your data platform should enable these capabilities across regions

and clouds without reducing the performance of operations
against your primary data. In other words, analysts, data scien-
tists, software developers, and other knowledge workers should
be able to do their jobs without worrying about where they are or
where their data is coming from, confident that it’s always avail-
able when they need it.

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 Each public cloud provider has different levels of regional pres-
ence. A cross-cloud data platform should enable secure access to
data globally while upholding regional data privacy laws. This
allows you to select cloud providers that meet the needs of each
application, business unit, and competitive scenario.

Delivering Federated Governance

Putting your data in a modern cloud data platform simplifies data
governance by making it easier for business users to comply with
industry-specific and region-specific requirements yet maintain
the freedom to locate their data in whichever public cloud has
the strongest local presence. With such “federated” governance,
domain owners of data can easily define and apply fine-grained
policies, all in keeping with centrally managed governance
processes  — even as data is shared among clouds, regions, and
workloads. Domain teams can discover and query the same data,
and their resulting views of the data set can change based on their
role and the data sensitivity, drastically simplifying governance
while allowing teams to obtain value from a single copy of data.

Cloud agnostic doesn’t simply mean storing your data and operat-
ing your workloads in whatever cloud you choose. It also means
standardizing on a single cloud data platform built on a single
code base that operates seamlessly across all the clouds your
organization relies upon.

ENABLING A MULTI-CLOUD
STRATEGY
Founded in 1851, financial services company Western Union enables
customers to pay bills, send money, and pick up cash at more than
550,000 agent locations worldwide. To ensure exceptional experi-
ences for more than 250 million customers across retail and digital
channels, Western Union ingests and analyzes large amounts of
transactional data.

(continued)

CHAPTER 7 Maximizing Availability and Business Continuity with a Cross-Cloud Strategy 43

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 (continued)

Unfortunately, its legacy data architecture, which consisted of multiple

on-premises data warehouses, made it difficult to gain a comprehen-
sive view of each customer. Developing visualizations, provisioning
users, ensuring 24/7 uptime, and performing maintenance across a
wide variety of systems was operationally burdensome and diverted
attention from analytics. Copying large amounts of data, as many as
five times due to different ingestion processes, created dissimilarities
in the data and questions about mismatched data sets. Increased
demand for analytics led to resource contention, despite costly and
time-consuming hardware upgrades.

Seeking to consolidate these disparate systems, Western Union imple-

mented a cloud data platform that powers a unified, seamless experi-
ence across multiple public clouds, including Amazon Web Services
and Google Cloud Platform. As a result, various divisions within the
company can pick the best cloud for each use case and replicate data
between clouds without additional pipelines.

Today, integrating data from Western Union’s sales, marketing, and

service clouds provides actionable insights to help frontline staff ele-
vate advertising performance and customer loyalty. The cloud data
platform has allowed the company to consolidate more than 30 data
stores and utilize a wide variety of business intelligence tools. For
example, C-level executives rely on Tableau dashboards to monitor
Western Union’s transaction volume and value. Data science teams
use Amazon SageMaker to create machine learning models and then
move the results into self-service dashboards that display metrics
about model performance.

Having a single system has reduced costs by more than 50 percent.

Eight data operations teams — which previously existed to keep data
flowing and provide system maintenance — have been combined,
reduced, or redeployed to more valuable projects. The multi-cluster
shared data architecture scales instantly to handle Western Union’s
data, users, and workloads without resource contention. In the future,
Western Union plans to use the cloud data platform and an associ-
ated data marketplace to share insights with approximately 37,000
B2B clients.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Outlining the essential elements of cloud
security and data protection

»» Enforcing comprehensive yet

nonintrusive data security and
governance policies

»» Centrally authorizing and authenticating

users

Chapter  8
Leveraging a Secure and
Governed Data Platform

P
rotecting your data and complying with industry and
regional regulations is fundamental to a cloud data plat-
form’s architecture, implementation, and operation. All
aspects of the service must center on maintaining security, pro-
tecting sensitive information, and complying with industry
mandates.

Introducing Key Principles

The three major aspects of good governance are knowing your
data, protecting your data, and unlocking data across teams and
workloads — and with external data consumers (see Figure 8-1).

Centralizing control
Good governance is much easier to achieve when all database
objects (data structures such as tables and views used to store and
reference data) are centrally maintained and updated by the data
platform. The data platform should apply fine-grained governance
across all the different objects, not just the database, and those
governance policies should be always replicated with the data.

CHAPTER 8 Leveraging a Secure and Governed Data Platform 45

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 FIGURE 8-1: Comprehensive data governance is based on these three
fundamental principles.

This fundamental principle makes all your other security prac-

tices more effective. For example, it’s one of the things that makes
secure data sharing and collaboration possible: By creating access
to read-only views of a data provider’s data, you can maintain a
single source of the data and authorize data consumers with the
appropriate levels of access.

To maximize data availability while minimizing risk, the right

cloud data platform should allow you to create flexible data-
access policies backed by centrally enforced protections, controls,
and audit procedures. Common methods include:

»» Interaction controls, such as secure views, secure joins,

and secure user-defined functions (UDFs), are dynamically
applied as people interact with the data.
»» Traceability features allow data owners to track data
where it lives to ensure protections are continually applied
and allow for data deletion where appropriate (such as the
“right to be forgotten”).

Enforcing access policies

A cloud data platform should always authorize users, authenticate
their credentials, and grant users access only to the data they’re
authorized to see. Role-based access control applies these restric-
tions based on each user’s role and function in the organization.
For example, finance personnel can view data from the general
ledger, HR professionals can view data on salaries and benefits,
and so on. These controls can be applied to all database objects,

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 including the tables where data is stored, the schemas that
describe the database structure, and any virtual extensions to the
database, such as views.

Role-based access policies should be centrally managed and uni-

versally enforced. It should be easy for data owners to grant per-
missions and then later update or rescind them as the data set
evolves and when people take on new responsibilities or move to
new positions. Whether a person is accessing data from a differ-
ent region or cloud, that person’s permissions must remain the
same. The permissions should “follow the data.” With a modern
cloud data platform, these security constraints should be built in
and easy to set up and scale without placing an additional burden
on your database administrators or IT team.

Protecting sensitive data

Once data resides within a cloud data platform, you can control
access to that data in several ways, including:

»» Secure views, such as allowing customers to see only

specific rows of data from a table and not to see rows that
pertain to other customers, allow organizations to control
access to data and avoid potential security breaches.
»» Secure joins can establish discrete linkages (to people,
devices, cookies, or other identifiers) without exchanging or
making visible any personally identifiable information (PII).
»» Secure UDFs allow data consumers to link, join, and analyze
fine-grained data while preventing other parties from
viewing or exporting the raw data.

For example, by sharing only certain views, a data provider can

limit the degree of exposure to the underlying tables. Data con-
sumers can query specific databases, tables, and views only if
granted access privileges. A consumer may have permission to
query the view but be denied access to the rest of the table. By
creating these secure views, the data provider can control access
to a shared data set and avoid security breaches.

Data access policies should not change the data in the under-
lying table: They should be dynamically applied when the table
is queried. For example, a national sales database can be set up
with row-level access restrictions so sales reps can see only the
account information for their regions.

CHAPTER 8 Leveraging a Secure and Governed Data Platform 47

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 Without these flexible governance policies, data stewards would
have to copy regional sales information into separate tables to share
data with the pertinent sales regions — one table for the southwest
region, another table for the northwest region, and so on. How-
ever, changes in the base table need to be copied and merged to
all the regional tables, requiring constant administration. A cloud
data platform simplifies this scenario by allowing a sales manager
to maintain data in one base table, to which secure views and other
access policies are applied dynamically at query time.

Another common method is to mask or anonymize part of the data

set, such as revealing only the ZIP code fields from an address
table. This would be a good way to allow data scientists to access
the data they need to make regional predictions without exposing
the people or households involved. This same logic can be applied
to Social Security numbers, salary information, credit card infor-
mation, and any other type of data that should be protected from
unauthorized users. Centralized security policies can allow you to
unlock more value from your data while maintaining control and
minimizing risks.

Ideally, these data access policies should “follow the data”

between clouds and regions, which Chapter  7 discusses, and
defined roles should be applied and enforced across the entire
organization for easy management.

Complying with regulations

Centralizing data governance also makes complying with data
privacy mandates easier. Many organizations have concerns about
the proper use of PII, protected health information (PHI), com-
petitive data, and other types of sensitive information. In some
cases, they must adhere to strict regulations governing the secu-
rity and privacy of consumer data, such as the European Union’s
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the United States’
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996
(HIPAA), and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). These
regulations must be observed throughout the entire lifecycle of
your data — from creation and storage, to usage and sharing, to
archiving and deletion.

A cloud data platform should help you comply with all pertinent
industry regulations and provide security and compliance reports
upon request. Your cloud data platform vendor must demon-
strate that it adequately monitors and responds to threats and
security incidents and has sufficient incident response procedures

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 in place. Industry-standard attestation reports verify that cloud
vendors use appropriate security controls. Check with your data
platform provider to ensure the reports you need are available.
Common certifications include:

»» OC 1 Type I: An independent auditor’s attestation of the

financial controls the provider has had in place during the
report’s coverage period
»» SOC 2 Type II: An independent auditor’s attestation of the
security controls the provider has had in place during the
report’s coverage period
»» PCI-DSS: A set of data security standards from the payment
card industry to which merchants must adhere when dealing
with consumer data
»» HITRUST/HIPAA: A comprehensive set of baseline security
and privacy controls for organizations that deal with
healthcare data
»» ISO/IEC 27001: A set of standards for establishing, imple-
menting, maintaining, and improving information security
»» FedRAMP Moderate: A standardized approach to enforcing
data security for federal agencies within the U.S. government
»» GxP: Data integrity requirements for life sciences organiza-
tions that produce regulated medical products

Encrypting data
Encrypting data involves applying an encryption algorithm to
translate readable text into ciphertext, which contains a form of
the original plaintext that is unreadable by a human or computer
without the proper cipher to decrypt it.

Decryption, the inverse of encryption, is the process of turning

ciphertext into readable plaintext. This is fundamental to secu-
rity, and your cloud data platform should ensure it happens by
default, automatically, all the time, and without impacting the
performance of your data-dependent workloads.

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 Data should be encrypted in transit and at rest, which means from
the time it leaves your premises, through the Internet or another
network connection, and into the platform. It should be encrypted
when it’s stored on disk, when it’s moved into a staging location,
when it’s placed within a database object, and when it’s cached
within a data repository. Query results should also be encrypted.

The cloud data platform vendor should also protect the decryption
keys that decode your data from ciphertext back to plaintext. The
best cloud vendors deploy AES 256-bit encryption with a hierar-
chical key model. This method encrypts the encryption keys and
instigates key rotation that limits the time any single key can be
used, further strengthening security.

Sharing centralized data

Breaking down data silos across your ecosystem and central-
izing data in a common repository makes governance easier. It
also facilitates the secure and easy sharing of data. Chapter 7 dis-
cusses how a modern cloud data platform enables data providers
to control access to data and establish secure views of that data.
It allows you to share data safely and securely by easily setting up
centralized policies and permission structures based on depart-
ment, region, role, and other considerations. Each data team can
define and manage the policies that are appropriate for their data.

A cloud data platform should also anchor a thriving ecosystem of

technology partners to give you options for what you do with your
data. To uphold strong security, this integration can be achieved
with two types of controls for network security: private connec-
tivity and via a known range of IP addresses. The data never tra-
verses the public Internet, which significantly reduces exposure
to common security threats. For example, automated machine
learning (AutoML) tools from third-party vendors can be con-
sumed through dashboards, reports, and predictive analytics via
connections to other ecosystem partners. The data, compute pro-
cessing, and machine learning results reside in the data platform
for easy access.

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Maximizing performance for all types of
usage

»» Understanding data processing engines

»» Identifying limitations with commodity

cloud providers

»» Establishing a cohesive set of cloud

services

Chapter  9
Achieving Optimal
Performance in the
Cloud

I
n the cloud, rapid data processing means less resource con-
sumption and lower costs. Virtually unlimited cloud resources
make it easy to scale vertically and horizontally, to bring in new
teams that can all run more types of operations on your data in
parallel without contention. However, you need a flexible data
platform to properly leverage all that compute power, provision
the right amount of resources, and easily process all types of data
for many kinds of workloads. Without these essential ingredients,
you can’t easily put the data to work for your business.

Maximizing Performance for All Data

Processing Activities
A modern cloud data platform should accelerate everything from
storing and processing data to handling transactions, securing
data, and managing metadata. One platform, governed by one set
of services, should support the needs of analysts, data scientists,

CHAPTER 9 Achieving Optimal Performance in the Cloud 51

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 data engineers, and also application developers creating new data
products for your internal stakeholders or external customers.
Additionally, all users should interact with the same data without
contending for resources or experiencing data processing delays.

This versatility is made possible only by a data processing engine

that works exceptionally well for a wide range of workloads. As a
result, your organization can standardize on one universal, flex-
ible, and open data platform optimized for many data manage-
ment and data analytic activities, rather than having to acquire,
learn, and apply a unique data processing system to each task and
then stitch them together (see Figure 9-1).

FIGURE 9-1: A modern cloud data platform should deliver the power, speed,
seamlessness, and versatility of running a near-unlimited number of
concurrent and interconnected data workloads, at practically any data scale.

For example, a data engineering team can process data through

high-volume data pipelines while a data scientist team conducts
exploratory analysis, and a business unit queries an immense
data set. All these activities should happen at the same time with-
out performance issues. They should also happen seamlessly
between each other. As Chapter 1 describes, only a multi-­cluster
shared data architecture can enable all teams to experience great

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 performance and scale these separate processes at will, without
resource contention. The platform should automatically manage
each workload to maximize throughput and ensure consistent
results, making it possible for thousands of users to simulta-
neously analyze and share the same single copy of data with no
bottlenecks.

A cloud data platform architected first and foremost for the cloud
can automatically provision nearly limitless amounts of compute
power to support virtually any number of users and workloads
without affecting performance.

Understanding Data Integration

and Performance Issues
The world is awash with data, giving rise to many data process-
ing tools and strategies. Typically, each data workload requires
a unique data processing engine — purpose-built and tuned for
each workload. For example, you might need one type of engine
for loading and transforming data via pipelines, another for pro-
cessing analytic queries, a third for training machine learning
models, and so forth. Each engine may be tied to its own data
repository and may require different programming languages,
such as SQL or Scala. Each must be properly tuned to maximize
performance for that workload’s unique attributes.

Because these data processing engines support very dispa-

rate workloads, they have very different features and functions
that make it difficult, if not impossible, to easily stitch them all
together to deliver a cohesive data experience for an enterprise.
As a result, organizations commonly end up with a separate envi-
ronment for each data workload, all operating in isolation. Each
one requires unique skills, tools, services, and overhead — from
data engineers developing data pipelines, to business analysts
running reports, to data scientists developing predictive models,
to application developers creating and maintaining data apps.

These discrete technologies may vie for a finite set of compute

resources in traditional on-premises systems and many cloud

CHAPTER 9 Achieving Optimal Performance in the Cloud 53

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 services. If one team is running a heavy data preparation job while
another is crunching end-of-the-month financial reports, both
teams may experience resource contention and thus poor per-
formance or failed jobs. Adding more resources can be a lengthy
process, requiring new capital expenditures, complex implemen-
tation cycles, and ongoing system maintenance.

Identifying limitations with

cloud providers
The big cloud providers all offer customers near-limitless
amounts of compute and storage capacity. These vendors have
amassed thriving ecosystems of data processing tools and utili-
ties, some developed internally and others by third parties. In
addition to utilizing the raw data storage and compute infrastruc-
ture services from these cloud platforms, customers can choose
from a wide array of add-on services for everything from prepar-
ing data to processing queries to building and training machine
learning models.

These cloud platform ecosystems allow you to select from hun-

dreds of services for accessing, preparing, and processing data.
However, many of these services use unique data processing
engines with their own access requirements, maintenance pro-
cedures, and learning curves. It’s up to you to figure out how
to make them work together. If you don’t, you will quickly find
yourself confronting the same data-silo and data-access chal-
lenges you encountered in the on-premises world: disparate ser-
vices, each with their own data pipelines, development tools, and
management utilities.

The critical issue is this: Can the cloud vendor and its associ-
ated ecosystem of add-on services fulfill all your data manage-
ment and analytic needs cohesively without forcing you to master
unique languages, development techniques, and management
tools? What services are layered on top of the basic cloud infra-
structure to handle data engineering, business analytics, data sci-
ence, and other tasks? How easy is it to integrate and use data for
these various activities?

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 In many cases, the burden is on you to figure out how to perform
each business task, integrate data, and synthesize the results back
into the platform. Training your team to work synergistically is
no small task, especially for an organization that seeks to maxi-
mize the accessibility and usability of its data.

Having a cloud data platform that spans multiple clouds allows

you to keep your data closer to the processing of that data, which
minimizes data latency and maximizes performance. For example,
if a new data app becomes popular in Japan, you probably don’t
want application data stored in America or Western Europe. Not
just software companies, but any multinational firm with diverse
geographic requirements, can benefit from having regional and
cross-cloud flexibility. See Chapter 7 for additional details.

Reviewing limitations of point solutions

Other questions should naturally arise as you evaluate the vari-
ous products within these respective cloud ecosystems. Do they
perform well in concert? Do they all share a common interface?
Do they complement each other as a cohesive set of services, or
does it seem more like a bunch of independently developed capa-
bilities? If you cobble together a bunch of products within a cloud
vendor’s ecosystem, it may be hard to make it all work together
well enough to achieve your performance goals. For example, if
multiple users use the same service to access data, can the cloud
provider minimize resource contention among multiple teams?

Some cloud data platform vendors claim that they can run all
types of workloads against one common data repository, but the
data processing engine isn’t accessible to all users, and it doesn’t
dedicate resources to each workload. That means each team must
lobby IT to request resources or fight for compute time with other
groups. Performance degrades as contention increases. Be sure to
ask vendors whether all concurrent workloads execute simulta-
neously without impacting the performance of other workloads
and services. If they can’t, end users may be forced to manage
their resources and learn a specialized set of skills to use the
performance engine.

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 SUPPORTING DATA ENGINEERING,
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, AND
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
When U.K. supermarket giant Sainsbury’s set out to make analytics
more cost-effective and accessible to its employees, the first step was
to consolidate functionally siloed data from multiple operating com-
panies into a modern cloud data platform. In addition to being the
second-largest general merchandise and clothing business in the U.K.,
Sainsbury’s owns a bank and hundreds of grocery stores. The organi-
zation has thousands of employees and millions of customers and
performs billions of transactions each year.

To populate its data platform, Sainsbury’s data engineers combined

data from three large enterprise data stores: supply chain analytics
from its food business, customer loyalty analytics from its nationwide
loyalty program, and data from a traditional enterprise data ware-
house. The cloud data platform made it relatively easy to rationalize
these data silos into a common format and democratize the data
among three groups of employees: data scientists, professional ana-
lysts, and employees who want to know more about their customers
but lack the technical skills to do the analytics.

These three systems now publish raw data directly to the cloud data
platform, which populates a dashboard that streams data to the digi­
tal trading teams. Data that was formerly difficult to access from
Sainsbury’s retail stores and other consumer-facing channels is now
readily available. Store managers can obtain standard reports via
cloud-based dashboards that offer visibility into customer needs and
preferences. In addition, data scientists and machine learning engi-
neers are creating new data sets by accessing raw data from a data
lake, which resides within the cloud data platform. The cloud-built
platform separates storage and compute resources, improving per­
formance and eliminating resource contention for thousands of
users. Queries that used to take six hours in a legacy data warehouse
now run in three seconds in the cloud data platform.

“Being connected to our customers, knowing and serving them better,

is a core pillar of our strategy,” Sainsbury’s Chief Data and Analytics
Officer Helen Hunter said. “This involves bringing together disparate
data assets and democratizing data for the good of every user.”

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 IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Considering your overall requirements

»» Identifying the data and workloads you

want to migrate

»» Comparing solutions and options

»» Determining total cost of ownership and

the return on your investment

»» Assessing success criteria

Chapter  10
Five Steps for Getting
Started with a Cloud
Data Platform

T his chapter guides you through five key steps to choosing a

cloud data platform for your organization.

Step 1: Evaluate Your Needs

Consider the nature of your data, the skills and tools already in
place, your usage needs, your plans, and how a data platform can
take your business in new directions. Remember, a cloud data
platform isn’t a disparate set of tools or services. It’s one inte-
grated platform that enables many workloads, including data
warehouses for analytics, data lakes for data exploration, data
engineering for data ingestion and transformation, data science
for developing predictive applications and machine learning mod-
els, data application development and operation, and data sharing
for easily and securely sharing data among authorized users.

CHAPTER 10 Five Steps for Getting Started with a Cloud Data Platform 57

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 These workloads have unique attributes, but all depend on the
universal principles of availability, reliability, extensibility, dura-
bility, security, governance, and ease of use. Keep these essential
workloads in mind as you ask yourself these questions:

»» Existing tools and processes: Are there entrenched tools,

work habits, and business practices you want to accommo-
date with your cloud data platform? What business pro-
cesses will it impact, and which departments will benefit?
»» Usage: Which users and applications will access or leverage
the cloud data platform? What types of queries will you run,
and by how many users? How much data will users need to
access, and how quickly? Which workloads will you run, and
how will they vary over time?
»» Data sharing: Do you plan to share data within your
organization and with customers and/or external partners?
Will you enrich that data by adding data analytics services?
Will you look for data monetization opportunities?
»» Global access: Do you have specific functional, regional, or
data sovereignty/ requirements? Do you need a cross-cloud
architecture to maximize deployment options, bolster
disaster recovery, or ensure global business continuity?
»» Resources: What staff do you have in place, and to what
extent can you apply those resources to these new data-
driven projects, workloads, and access patterns?

Step 2: Migrate or Start Fresh

Assess how much of your existing environment you wish to carry
forward:

»» Is this a brand-new project? If so, consider how you can

take full advantage of the capabilities of a cloud data
platform rather than pursuing an outdated approach or
strategy.
»» Which applications and workloads should you prioritize?
Consider migrating easy, straightforward workloads to the
new cloud data platform first. This will allow you to obtain
quick wins and solid validation from the user community
before you attempt to tackle more difficult initiatives.

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 »» Will your existing applications work with the new
platform? Business intelligence solutions, data visualization
tools, data science libraries, and other software development
tools should easily adapt to the new architecture.
»» How are your requirements likely to change in the
future? As you ponder emerging data-driven projects and
future application initiatives, make sure you are positioned
to accommodate new data, technologies, and capabilities
such as Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, and
artificial intelligence.

Step 3: Evaluate Solutions

As this book describes, your cloud data platform must take full
advantage of the true benefits of the cloud, with an architecture
based on three foundational pillars:

»» Convenient access to data via a near-zero-maintenance

environment
»» Exceptional performance for concurrent data-usage activities
»» Easy and secure analysis and sharing of data, both across
the organization and within a broad ecosystem

In that vein, make sure your choice meets these architectural

criteria:

»» Natively integrates structured, semi-structured, and unstruc-

tured data and avoids creating data silos
»» Includes integrated policy-based data governance controls
that follow the data
»» Shares live data without having to copy or move that data
»» Replicates databases and keeps them synchronized across
regions and clouds to improve business continuity and
streamline expansion
»» Scales compute and storage capacity independently and
automatically, and scales concurrency instantly and near-
infinitely without slowing performance

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 Step 4: Calculate TCO and ROI
If you choose a cloud data platform that accommodates all types
of data and that has been designed first and foremost for the
cloud, you should be able to pay for actual usage in per-second
increments and minimize additional costs, such as maintaining
multiple systems and training people to handle diverse data.

If you outsource everything to the vendor by choosing a data-

platform-as-a-service offering, you can calculate the total cost of
ownership (TCO) based on the expected usage fees. If you opt to
use an external object store from one of the big cloud vendors, you
also need to add the costs of that vendor’s services.

Calculate the return on investment (ROI) over the expected life-

time of the data platform options you’re considering. Don’t over-
look the savings possible with features such as scaling up and
down dynamically in response to changing demand.

Consider the potential revenue impact of monetizing your data. A

cloud data platform helps you maximize the value of your data —
and not just the data you have within your own four walls but also
external third-party data available via data marketplaces.

As a data provider, you can offer governed slices of your data to

potentially thousands of data consumers to create new revenue
streams. You can also combine your data with marketplace data to
create valuable products and services.

Step 5: Establish Success Criteria

How will you measure the success of the new cloud data platform
initiative? Identify the most important business and technical
requirements, focusing on performance, concurrency, simplicity,
and TCO.

For example, does the new data platform make your organiza-
tion more productive? Does it simplify access to key workloads,
break down data silos, and boost collaboration? Bringing your
data together brings your teams together. Calculate the impact of
standardizing on one centralized system versus struggling with
a patchwork of tools, apps, and data sets. Focus on measurable,
quantifiable criteria and qualitative enhancements.

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