Is there a space for the 4th cloud platform?
Looking Beyond AWS, Azure & GCP….
In the last few years, AWS, Azure & GCP have been the 3 cloud platforms that many enterprises & even smaller businesses have adopted. These 3 have a major presence across geographies & across industries. Whenever any organization starts exploring the cloud platforms for their cloud journey, these are the only 3 names that keep on making several rounds. Some of the organizations, decide on 1 of these or a few enterprises also start with a hybrid journey which has its own advantages & disadvantages.
But is there a space for the 4th cloud? Is there any other cloud platform that can be a good investment & provide similar features, cost benefits & scalability options?
Welcome to the world of data cloud platforms!
For organizations specifically looking to migrate & modernize their data workloads, these data cloud platforms can be a great choice. They offer specific features for data-related workloads and simplicity in terms of usage & management which is a key factor in today’s world where various roles like Data Engineers, Data Analysts, Data Scientists & Business Analysts are getting merged into a single Data Everything Role.
Above all, such data cloud platforms can work on top of any of the 3 cloud providers. Users have a choice to provision these on top of either AWS, Azure or GCP
Enter Snowflake — the data cloud platform!
Snowflake now has features that can be leveraged to implement various data use cases. It is no more just a cloud data-warehouse but offers a lot more. In fact, the first time I have heard the term “data cloud platform” was on Snowflake’s website
Here are some of the key features of Snowflake that makes it a complete data cloud platform
- Support for storing structured, semi-structured as well unstructured data
- Easy & Continous Data Ingestion from other cloud storages like AWS S3, Azure Blob & Google Cloud Buckets
- Time-Travel for accessing older versions & maintaining complete history
- ACID Support
- Data sharing with other Snowflake accounts, data market place
- and my personal favorite — “undrop table” command. How cool is that?
All these features make Snowflake one of the top contenders for hosting your data solutions.
So is there any other player in this space? I am sure there will be many others but the one that I have explored is Databricks which also offers a lot of these features
Databricks is a complete “data + AI” platform & truly leverages the lakehouse concept so users don’t have to build a separate data warehouse
Some really cool features offered by Databricks are as below
- Spark-based platform — Big Data developers would love this
- Notebooks — code using various languages Python, Scala, SQL, R
- Collaboration — Data Engineers & Scientists can collaborate easily
- Delta Lake — Brings in ACID capabilities to Data Lake
- and many more features like MLOps, easy & quick visualizations within notebooks, databricks SQL for warehousing needs
With all these features, Databricks can be “the” single platform for all Data as well as AI workloads. Using delta lakes& databricks SQL, one can truly implement a single source of truth of data for all BI to AI needs
Both Snowflake & Databricks can be considered as the 4th cloud platform for the data world. They may not offer the IaaS like features but they do have most of the stuff that an organization would need to build their data use cases.
Both of them offer trial/community editions so please good ahead & explore them. I’m sure you will be impressed with the features that they offer — especially if you are someone like me who has spent a Friday night trying to recover an accidentally dropped table from the production system!
