Every business wants to do more with its data. At the same time, words like big data, digital transformation, and service-oriented technology have been circulating for so many years, it can be difficult to understand their real-world value.
Instead, we should focus on what we want to achieve. When I listen to a company’s phrase ‘digital transformation’, it states that they want to create a better user experience. When a company talks about big data, I see a business that wants to improve the way data is collected, analyzed, and used. Service-oriented technology is slightly more technical and covers distributed computing, but the result is a company that can develop, release, iterate, and maintain software faster and with greater agility.
Make Data A Star
This way involves using cloud computing using data. Instead of lifting everything in the cloud, you can now use ‘cloud-native’ services that can take advantage of newer and more dynamic environments. We are moving away from the world of hardware to bring in ports for server racking and massive infrastructure and this network is communicating with each other. Each of these elements has layers and they are all seen, monitored, protected, and maintained.
However, we have to go beyond this. For developers, they can care less about individual infrastructure elements, even if they can provide scale and availability for their applications. Instead, we should look at how easy it is to work with overtime. How new features can be given in the same sprint and not in months.
It involves another layer of abstraction, but using automation can make it easier for all of us to work with data, rather than understanding and running ourselves.
It may be easier to interpret this approach similar to self-driving cars: while tests are getting around autonomous vehicles, we have not yet arrived there and will need to evolve over time. Instead, we have more help to make driving easier and safer. For example, if a car comes in front of me, my car can stop before thinking about it.
For cloud-native databases, the same level of automation can help give more automation and guidance on how things run in the background. Instead of relying on individuals to configure and run these installations, automation can help put together the most appropriate and efficient set-up, then make recommendations on what to do next when the necessary changes occur.
Speed around Data
In the real-world context, what all this automation does is help make innovation easier, and it enables businesses to match consumer patterns to their infrastructure. A good fresh example of this is the explosive growth of kerbside pickup and delivery. Almost overnight, it became an important service for consumers during the epidemic. For large retailers such as Home Depot, Target, and Walmart, the in-store pick went from offering a niche to the most used service for customers in the second quarter.
As an example, Home Depot had to be launched in thirty days as COVID caught. The company saw a nearly 100% increase in sales of its digital platform this quarter, with the new pickup service being used more than 60%. Fahim Siddiqui, Home Depot’s SVP of Information Technology, told of the Inspired Execution Podcast, “People had everything to do, to base the process and technology and deliver a truly unique service.
Moving to the cloud-native
What we’re seeing in this data-driven world is more automation based on the reliability and ubiquity of the cloud. However, this goal depends on how data and IT operations management tasks can be handled in the background. DataOps is almost the last limit for large-scale application infrastructure. This means that DataOps is going to be more than a service; you’re probably renting your data operation, you won’t deploy it. It will be cloud-native, so wherever you are in the world and you need data for it, it’s available.
It will depend on automation to help us make better decisions, save money, and make sure everything is as efficient as possible. This will ensure that the infrastructure we have for use cases is in the correct configuration. The layer below the world we are living in now has a database or what we call a backend. But it’s affecting everything: developers want the API, events, microservices, and queues to go into queries, each part of it to be dynamic, scalable, and self-healing. If you have this block diagram deployed as the infrastructure for your application. I think you will be very happy because you can answer questions, you can answer world changes, and you can grow as you need. If the business wants to extract value from another part of your business, you can do it quickly.