Cloud and Open Source

 

While developers may prefer open source solutions over closed, proprietary ones as they offer more ‘freedom’, they actually prefer the convenience of using open source software without requiring approval from a swathe of other business departments in their organisation. This has also started applying to cloud solutions, as open source providers are available in a timelier manner and in a non-preferential manner.

In order for multicloud to work, developers need tools that allow them to build with the best-in-class technologies that are also open – such as MongoDB or PostgreSQL. This is because these technologies can run across different cloud, data centre, and PC environments thus making it more convenient for a developer to use. A developer must be able to run these technologies in their vanilla format so that the application is portable across different cloud environments.

PostgreSQL, for example, is run on certain cloud providers but with additional patches and performance improvements. The vanilla version that anyone can download doesn’t have these features, but those enterprises with multicloud success have decided to use these battle-tested vanilla versions of open technologies to improve portability and convenience for developers.

Each cloud environment is different and using an open source technology that developers can carry between these solutions is extremely powerful. A developer that knows one of these technologies can be just as productive with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. It is still important for a developer to know the intricacies of each cloud vendor, but these open source technologies allow developers to transfer their skills between these cloud environments.

So while cloud perfects many of the motives that developers first chose to work with open source, cloud has certainly not rendered open source extinct as previous commentators first imagined.

Governance is Essential to Cloud Success

 

Cloud governance is essential to ensure cost optimisation and cloud security is properly maintained, and yet many IT professionals do not yet understand how it works or how best to implement it. Recent research by Stacklet found 86% of IT professionals agreed cloud governance can be a key inhibitor to cloud adoption and cost optimisation and security are pivotal areas where governance approaches and tools are critical to the success of the cloud solution.

Many cloud leaders believe governance is already implemented in their deployments, whether this is right or not. However, executives also seem to believe that their governance lacks visibility and the cross-organisation collaboration required to optimise costs and improve security. Many individuals wrongly assume that governance is native to cloud-based solutions, but it is actually a separate focus that requires specific policies surrounding the resources and services that an application or API provides.

These policies should not be static, but instead dynamic logical operators that contextualise when, who, what, where, and how somebody is accessing a resource. Make use of AI to interpret and learn the behaviours of users to implement such dynamic policies. These are much more flexible and secure than static policies that cannot predict such behaviours.

Alteryx Cloud Analytics

 

A recent Gartner report predicts two-thirds of development and production analytics will be performed in the cloud by 2023. 75% of businesses are transitioning to the cloud for their analytics, or are already there. While many enterprises look to the cloud giants such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, other cloud providers focused with on-premises solutions are making moves. One such provider, Alteryx, recently announced its Analytics Cloud earlier this month which is a unified end-to-end automation platform for business analytics.

Alteryx recently acquired Trifacta, a data engineering software company that provides integration with other cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake and also provides architecture for the 3 giant cloud providers previously mentioned. This technology allows Alteryx to offer competitive deployment solutions that can meet any business analytical needs that may arise. This acquisition also improves Alteryx’s credibility with data engineers that manage the data pipelines and analytical tools and applications for enterprises.

Their aim is to “democratise analytics” and not leave the analysis to the data scientists, as the company’s chief data and analytics officer explains how simple it is to become certified in Alteryx and how the platform can be used to improve performance in a two-mile race or determine the correct amount of nutrition and sleep a person should be obtaining.

Analytics needs to move to the cloud as businesses become more sophisticated and an increase in processor power is needed to analyse the vast amounts of data; the cloud offers the perfect scalability for this. It is also important that the analytic tools are available where the data is, and as more customer data is exported to the cloud, the capabilities to analyse that data need to migrate too. While Alteryx’s approach is “cloud first”, they are continuing their on-premises products with the possibility of deploying cloud-native technologies on-premises in the future if required.