Creating a Data-Driven Enterprise with DataOps

Chapter 6. Cloud Architecture and Data Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Creating a self-service data culture within your organization can seem daunting. You need to recognize the technical and structural requirements of providing data access to all as well as the need for resource monitoring and chargebacks to individual groups. And you must accomplish this while maintaining robust security and compliance controls. However, all these requirements become much easier to achieve in the cloud. This chapter looks at the efficiency and agility your organization can achieve by moving your data-driven initiatives to the cloud.

Five Properties of the Cloud

There are five properties of the cloud that make it a uniquely suitable infrastructure for building a self-service data platform:

• Scalability

• Elasticity

• Self-service and collaboration

• Cost efficiencies

• Monitoring and usage-tracking capabilities

In this chapter, we discuss how these properties can help data teams create self-service data platforms.

Scalability

One of the biggest advantages of cloud computing is your ability to quickly expand infrastructure to meet the needs of your organization. Today, because of the cloud, huge amounts of infrastructure are now instantaneously available to any organization. Compute resources can be provisioned in minutes or even less. This is called scalability. If you suddenly need, say, a thousand more nodes of compute, you can get it today in the cloud due to the its scaling capabilities. Because of ...