Architecting Data-Intensive SaaS Applications

Chapter 1. Data Applications and Why They Matter

In the last decade we’ve seen explosive growth in data, driven by advances in wireless connectivity, compute capacity, and proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Data now drives significant portions of our lives, from crowdsourced restaurant recommendations to artificial intelligence systems identifying more effective medical treatments. The same is true of business, which is becoming increasingly data-driven in its quest to improve products, operations, and sales. And there are no signs of this trend slowing down: market intelligence firm IDC predicts the volume of data created each year will top 160 ZB by 2025,¹ a tenfold increase over the amount of data created in 2017.

This enormous amount of data has spurred the growth of data applications—applications that leverage data to create value for customers. Working with large amounts of data is a domain unto itself, requiring investment in specialized platforms to gather, organize, and surface that data. A robust and well-designed data platform will ensure application developers can focus on what they do best—creating new user experiences and platform features to help their customers—without having to spend significant effort building and maintaining data systems.

We created this report to help product teams, most of which are not well versed in working with significant volumes of fast-changing data, to understand, evaluate, and leverage modern data platforms for building ...