Data warehouse modernization has become an essential move to meet the demands of the modern business. And it is easy to get lost in the hype when it comes to modernizing with a “cloud-first” or “cloud-only” approach. Organizations are drawn to the promise of ultra-simplicity, unlimited scale, improved agility, and ubiquitous accessibility. But for some organizations that are on this path, they are starting to see the tradeoffs they have made. One of those tradeoffs comes with price/performance. Not that modern cloud data warehouses do not perform well, but if you want the low-latency performance to truly support real-time, you will either have to pay for it (especially at scale as more end-users want access to the data) or minimize your ability to truly achieve real-time responsiveness. And it is forcing organizations to rethink their cloud data warehouse strategies. Maybe an on-premises data warehouse does have a place? And so does a cloud data warehouse?
While several traditional on-premises data warehouses now have cloud services to enable hybrid cloud data warehousing, many still leverage their vintage architectures that were designed around a rigid on-premises pipeline process derived long before the hybrid cloud technologies of today existed. Release after release has resulted in improved capabilities, but at the expense of trading off functionality for added complexity, and with less-than-ideal levels of performance, cost, and agility.
One of the vendors I have been watching emerge in this modern, hybrid cloud data warehouse space is Yellowbrick. This is a company that natively designed its data warehouse for hybrid cloud, promising the best of both on-prem and cloud data warehousing worlds. Customers get the high performance and concurrency of specialized on-premises systems, while also gaining the agility, scalability, and simplicity of cloud-only solutions. Yellowbrick can be consumed as a service anywhere with the same data and performance everywhere—either on-premises/in a private cloud, through any public cloud, or a combination of both. And here’s the kicker: organizations don’t have to make a trade-off of performance or cost. ESG recently completed an economic study of Yellowbrick Data Warehouse to quantify the low and predictable cost savings through their fixed-cost annual subscription.
Hybrid cloud data warehousing will be critical going forward. Whether you are an organization looking to move traditional data warehousing workloads to the cloud or a company that started with a cloud data warehouse whose bills are starting to rise as performance demands increase, it may be worth evaluating (or re-evaluating) your options.
