Having a strong set of tools, however, isn’t sufficient to execute on a cloud-first data strategy. You also need to be able to manage all those tools along with the data itself. This task can quickly become overwhelming.
First, the stack itself has many different moving parts, all of which interact with and depend on one another. It’s already difficult to find and retain specialized talent who can set up, maintain, and run a database. But when you do have the resources in-house, inevitably, a project team will encounter a problem that requires very deep expertise in the specific technology the team is using to solve it — expertise that the team likely won’t have.
“When the pressure’s on, more often than not, you don't get the luxury of sort of trying to figure this out in a testing environment,” said Troy Sellers, solution architect at Google Cloud technology partner Aiven. “You've got your customers and your stakeholders peeking their eyes over the fence to see how it’s all working out.”
But even factoring these difficult situations out of the equation, the core engineering team often ends up spending a great deal of their time maintaining the environment and responding to production incidents and other fire drills, which causes production releases to slip. These highly skilled specialists are some of the most expensive resources in the entire company. It’s a very poor use of their skills, which need to be applied to innovation and creating value for the organization and its customers.
Adding to the complexity and challenge of cloud data management is the need to comply with a sprawling tangle of international regulations around data privacy, data sovereignty and security. Compliance is already difficult if you’re operating only within the borders of a single nation. If you’re a global business, it becomes orders of magnitude more complex.
Having a strong developer toolset is a key driver of innovation. A McKinsey study, for example, found that organizations that employ strong developer tools are 65% more innovative than those who use weaker toolsets. Strong tools also make an enormous difference when it comes to retaining top talent. Companies whose developers had access to the right tools for the task at hand had 47% higher developer satisfaction and retention rates than did the lowest performers regarding tools.
Generally speaking, Open source tools are an excellent choice for organizations looking for strong developer tools. They’ll be far more powerful and reliable than those an organization develops on their own, and they’re likely to be much more cost efficient than proprietary tools.
“When you've got a large community and a really well-adopted open source project, there are a lot more people than you could bring into your team on your own budget identifying and squashing bugs as quickly as possible,” Sellers said. “You end up with much higher quality software effectively at a lower price.”
It’s also more effective and cost efficient to work with a partner who has specific expertise in these tools to manage and maintain them. In this way, a company’s resources can be fully devoted to innovation, while the partner takes care of the nuts and bolts of managing them.
“When developers have the right tool sets, especially tool sets that are fully managed, they can really save a lot of time and focus on the transformational parts of their business,” Sellers said.
Aiven specializes in providing fully managed open source tools that make developers’ lives easier so they can speed the pace of innovation.
When developers have the right tool sets, especially tool sets that are fully managed, they can really save a lot of time and focus on the transformational parts of their business.
