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  • Introduction to the Snowflake Date Warehouse

    With the turn of the century, the total volume of data and the speed at which it has been rising, show a consistent upward trend. In such a case, it becomes imperatively essential for organizations to efficiently tackle big data and its associated issues. One thing that comes as a rescue in these scenarios is the efficient adoption of a cloud based model for enhanced performance, scalability and overall flexibility. In recent times, Snowflake Data Warehouse has been gaining immense popularity, owing to its extended features and efficient results in data management.

    In our blog today, we will have a brief look at this warehouse architecture, features, pricing and more.

    What is Snowflake Data Warehouse?

    Snowflake is a SaaS-based data warehouse platform. It runs over MS Azure or an AWS cloud infrastructure. What’s different in this warehouse solution is that it uses an ANSI-compliant SQL engine that is so designed as to work entirely on the cloud. It supports many workloads being a single platform, such as data engineering, data applications, data sharing, data science and more.

    Also, the Snowflake stands apart from other warehouses in its architecture and data sharing capabilities, which we will see in the sections below.

    Snowflake Architecture: The USP

    The architecture of Snowflake is a hybrid of shared-disk and shared-nothing type. It consists of a central repository that has data and compute nodes that access the base disk storage.

    Under the Snowflake architecture, organizations get increased flexibility with big data. It has decoupled the compute and storage functions. So, what does this mean for the firms? Well, it eliminates the need for organizations to pay both for high storage needs with lesser CPU cycles or vice versa. So, organizations can benefit from paying only for those resources that they need to use. They get billed as per the total terabytes stored in a month and the computation is billed according to a per-second basis.

    The architecture of Snowflake is basically made of three layers : storage, compute and services. Each of these layers is independently scalable.

    Database Storage Layer

    This layer is responsible for holding all the data loaded onto Snowflake, be it structured or semistructured. Snowflake takes care of all the aspects of data storage including its organization, sizing, structure, statistics, metadata and more.

    Compute Layer

    This layer consists of multiple virtual warehouses that undertake data processing tasks for queries. Each of the warehouses have access to all the data in the storage layer and hence, do not compete with each other for compute resources. This ensures there is undisturbed automatic scaling.

    Cloud Services Layer

    This layer  uses ANSI SQL and is responsible for coordinating the entire system. This layers totally eliminates any need for manual data warehouse management. Main components in this layer include authentication, infrastructure and metadata management, access control and query parsing.

    Snowflake Data Warehouse benefits for businesses

    Snowflakes has revolutionized the way hardware-based data warehouses used to work and eliminates their disadvantages like limited scalability and delays etc. It benefits your business in the following ways.

    1. Performance and Speed: Being an elastic platform, it allows you to load data faster and run a high volume of queries efficiently, thanks to the extra compute resources. What’s even better is, once you are done with the period of high data need, you can scale down and only pay for the time you used the platform.
    2. Data sharing made seamless:  The architecture facilitates data sharing among other users. It also makes way for firms to share data with any data consumer, irrespective of whether they are a Snowflake customer or it.
    3. Storage and support for all kinds of data: Using Snowflake, you can mix both structured and semistructured data for analysis and put them on cloud database, without having to convert or transform any data.
    4. Highly secure warehouse: Snowflake is SOC 2 Type II certified and comes with extra security levels like encryption across all network communications. This ensures all your critical and confidential data is safe from any breaches whatsoever.

    Pricing

    The pricing for Snowflake data warehouse basically depends on the volume of data that you store on the cloud and the computing time you use. Hence, you do not need to pay for both, all the time! It gives you the option to turn compute resources on and off so that you only have to pay for your use time. There are four packages available, namely, standard, enterprise, business critical and Virtual private snowflake (VPS), which are curated to suit different needs of differently-sized enterprises. You can check out the entire pricing here. (https://www.snowflake.com/pricing/)

    If there are any queries regarding Snowflake data warehouse or other warehouses and you would like to speak to our consultants, you can get in touch with us today!

  • On-Premises and Cloud data warehouses – Differences

    Data warehousing is a process through which you can collect and manage your data from multiple sources. The data collected can serve as a source to capture meaningful business insights. The data management system of data warehousing is designed in such a way that it enables and supports activities related to business intelligence, specifically analytics. Data within a data warehouse is basically extracted from multiple sources like application log files and transaction applications. Looking at the data warehouse market, the global Data Warehouse as a Service (DWaaS) is expected to reach $4.7bn in 2021, at a CAGR of 22.3% from 2021-2026. Let’s check out the cloud data warehouses concepts, it’s extremely important while we consider working with offshore engineering services companies.

    Data Warehouse Concepts

    The architecture of a data warehouse is made of tiers consisting of the top tier, middle tier, and bottom tier. The front-end client is the top tier that gives results through reporting, analysis, and data mining tools. The middle tier has an analytics engine that can be utilized to access and analyze data. Lastly, the bottom tier is the database server where all the data is loaded and stored as well. The data in the bottom tier is stored in two ways that are:

    • Frequently accessed data is stored in very fast storage like SSD drives
    • Data not accessed frequently is stored in Amazon S3
    • Data warehouse at this point ensures that the frequently accessed data is moved into the fast storage to optimize the query speed.

    On-Premises Data Warehouse

    In on-premise data warehousing, the team is wholly responsible to carry out the actions due to its deployment nature. Go through some of the key benefits of a premise data warehouse.

    Control: The organization using on-premise has complete authority over which hardware or software to choose, where to place it, and who all can access it with the on-premise deployments. The IT team also has physical access to the hardware if there is any failure. The team can also go through every layer of software to troubleshoot the issue. The team doesn’t have to depend on third parties to solve the issues.

    Speed: The concerns related to network latency are alleviated in the on-premise data warehousing. Although, there can be some data sources accessible only over the internet. If your on-premise solution is not sized in a proper way it can impact the performance.

    Governance: Achieving data governance and regulatory compliance is easier with on-premise data warehousing. With on-premise data warehousing, users will exactly know the data location and won’t struggle with
    General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements.
    On-Premises: Challenges

    Database administrators and analysts, systems administrators, systems engineers, network engineers, and security specialists must design, procure, and install on-premises systems. They have the full responsibility to ensure that the underlying infrastructure is running properly, efficiently, reliably, and securely. Also, it is difficult for the on-premises data warehouse to accommodate larger activities that require large memory. To handle the peak load, organizations can buy tools for sizing the data warehouses.

    Cloud data warehouse:

    Cloud-based data warehouses take the advantage of the on-demand computing that includes far-reaching user access, seemingly limitless storage, and increased computational capacity. You can also scale and pay only for what is used. Some of the popular cloud-based data warehouses are Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure, and SnowflakeDB. Hosting the data warehouse in the cloud requires data integration tools that would turn the data into useful and actionable information. Let’s discuss some of the popular cloud bases data warehouses.

    AWS Redshift: Amazon Redshift is a product of Amazon Web Services and a part of Amazon’s cloud computing platform which is completely managed and highly reliable. This product is simple and cost-effective when it comes to analyzing all the business data using the business intelligence tools that are existing.
    Their product is built on the data warehouse technology MPP (Massive Parallel Processing) ParAccel by Actian. The product is a simple and cost-effective way to analyze and make decisions.

    Azure SQL Data warehouse: It is a cloud-based data warehouse that helps in building and delivering a data warehouse. The azure data warehouse can process a huge volume of relational and non-relational data. It is also responsible for offering SQL data warehouse capabilities on top of a cloud computing platform. Users using the Azure data warehouse can quickly scale, pause, and lessen their data warehouse resources.

    Snowflake: It is a fully managed SaaS(software as a service) developed in 2012. Snowflake offers a single platform for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and secure sharing of data. It supports third-party tools to handle the growing needs of organizations.

    Google Big Query: If you are looking to have agility in your business, you can opt for Google Big Query which is a serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective multicolor data warehouse.

    On-premise vs Cloud

    Deployment: On-premise resources are deployed in-house and cloud one is deployed in the off-site and in-house too.

    Costs: On-premise is more expensive as compared to the cloud.

    Control: On-premise data is totally controlled by the organization whereas cloud organization has control over selective access to third-party vendors.

    Security: On-premise security concerns can be reduced whereas cloud security concern is a barrier.
    Compliance: Organizations adopting on-premise have to comply with regulatory mandates. In the cloud, both enterprise and partner have to comply with regulatory mandates.

  • How DevOps Influence The Dynamics Of Offshore Software Development?

    The DevOps market size is likely to grow from $2.90 bn in 2017 to $10.31 bn by 2023, at a CAGR of 24.7% during the period 2017-2023. With the organization’s growing demand for DevOps and its services, it is highly expected to receive huge traction as the demand for quick application delivery maintains a high-quality increase. DevOps ensures that the business isn’t working in silos. It is development and operations in DevOps that unites people, processes, and technology to deliver a top-notch value to the customers.

    When we talk about offshore software development, it is not that easy and similarly, DevOps is also not a cakewalk. In one of our blogs, we have listed down some major steps to consider while selecting an offshore tech development partner. To have an effective collaboration, implementing new tools and technologies is quintessential in today’s times. Let’s find out the impact of offshore development and product engineering on DevOps.

    How Offshore Development Is Improving With DevOps?

    We have listed down some of the major points that showcase how DevOps is impacting offshore product development in various ways and making it better.

    ● Better quality of the product: Quality has always remained and will remain a major requirement for any business. Having an offshore product development team with a DevOps team highly helps the development teams to maintain the quality and costs properly. Establishing a well-collaborated team assists in identifying the shortcomings easily that further enhances the quality of the product.

    ● Improved culture: With the leveraging of the DevOps process by offshore development teams, it can be seen that it has transformed the development culture to a great extent. The DevOps ability to collaborate and establish communication amongst the teams has driven great outcomes. And, as the offshore software development teams are more focused on establishing a good culture throughout the development process are now moving more towards DevOps.

    ● Well-timed software delivery: In the offshore product development process, once the analysis and design are finished, it is sent to the remote developers to code and test. With DevOps, the entire process of software product development has been transformed with effective team collaboration, as mentioned in the previous point. It also releases small software for the teams to have better visibility and feedback opportunities. With this, you can go on building quick feedback loops, quicken the testing movement of hypotheses based on the client’s requirements. As a result, it helps in delivering the software product quickly to the market.

    ● Removes the concept of transferring the work: Offshore software development is all about handing over the work from one team to another. But, in DevOps, nothing like this exists to what happens in offshore processes. In the DevOps process, multiple teams come together and work on multiple tasks during the software product development. Thus, reducing the delays exponentially. The offshore team while using the DevOps process can continuously collaborate throughout the software development life cycle. They can also successfully keep a track of tasks during the coding, unit testing, script building to avoid any sort of rework.

    ● Adoption of analytics dashboards: DevOps has helped offshore teams with the adoption of analytical dashboards that would give them better visibility into the project. Dashboards give the teams real-time updates on project status, issues, challenges, as well as prompt improvement opportunities as well. Offshore software development teams can easily resolve the issues quickly if they use these tools and could make the development process productive.

    Thus, offshore development teams can manage out-of-scope and emergency requests easily with DevOps processes. As DevOps gives clarity on the project’s scope by allowing various iterations amongst the teams, the requests can be managed and fulfilled easily.

    As there are certain challenges while implementing the offshore development processes, DevOps has completely transformed the process. DevOps’ impact on offshore software development is turning out to be exceptional. The approach to adopt DevOps by the offshore teams or to collaborate with the DevOps teams will continue to improve the offshore development results in the coming years.

  • Successful Completion Of EOV’s One Year

    It was exactly a year ago when EOV was registered and Abhishek Nag, the CEO of Embarking On Voyage(EOV) started his entrepreneurial journey.

    For EOV’s successful completion of one year, we would sincerely like to thank and appreciate the support of our clients, colleagues, family, and friends and truly believing in us. Already we have built great relationships and our aim is to strengthen these relationships further by adding some more to our list. Thanks to each one of you who trusted us throughout this one-year journey and made it a success.

    “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey.” – Barbara Hoffman

    We have truly lived by this quote this entire year and we still continue to follow it religiously. As we started EOV with an aim to deliver excellence in the digital world in the best way we can, the start wasn’t smooth. Gradually things started taking shape and the business became fully functional as well as an operative from February 2021. Pandemic touched us as well but we never let the determination and spark become dull which was there since day one.

    We started with four headcounts that included the core members. Initially, we had three clients right after EOV was incorporated. We became fully operational in less than ten months and acquired ten new accounts of which two are amongst the fortune fifty. Currently, we are approaching thirty-seven headcounts. Our innovation hub is based out of Pune and we have two international sales offices based out of Virginia, USA, and The Netherlands.

    The CEO, Abhishek Nag comes with an experience of thirteen years and around fifty thousand business meetings globally. He decided to start his entrepreneurial journey after gaining fair experience in the global market and closely analyzing customer behavior in offshore software development services. One constant feedback he received from his clients was of the lack of an experienced offshore team. This motivated him to cater the right technical services by forming a team of skilled engineers and then fulfilling the growing global market demand. Being based out of the USA and Europe for a long, he also desired to create employment opportunities for skilled and talented people. His idea of delivering a differentiated digital experience with a positive customer experience is rightly aligned with his team members.

    The core team that is responsible for innovations and tagged as EOV’s problem solvers are Priya Nag (Director), Rajiv Paul (EVP – Sales & Delivery America), Mandar Thosar (Principal Advisor – Marketing), Dinesh Sonsale (Head of Engineering), and Pankaj Tayare (Engineering Lead). These leadership members also bring combined delivery experience of nearly 30 years in offshore product engineering services serving clients from Virginia, California, Chicago, Cologne, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Belgium, and The Netherlands.

    With our team of highly skilled engineers and subject-matter experts, we aim to become the value creators in the digital and data engineering space. We work towards innovation and writing green code, this is what we followed in our journey of one year as well.

    As the name suggests ‘Embarking On Voyage’, setting out on a journey. So, for us this symbolizes two parties coming together and setting out on their first journey. In this journey, our only aim is to be the right choice for our clientele and add more and more value to their tech product.

  • How mobile application plays an important role in Digital Transformation

    Generation Z, Millennials, and Gen X spend around 16%, 18%, and 30% more time year-over-year, respectively, in their most-used apps. Since the beginning of the pandemic, a drastic change in the behavior of consumers around the world has led to re-evaluate of the business models by many organizations. As we all are adapting to the new reality, the importance of digital transformation is increasing rapidly. In today’s world, mobile phones have become crucial to survival. As the usage of mobile apps is increasing exponentially, the industry is likely to generate $156bn in consumer app spending by 2022.

    The popularity of mobile apps amongst businesses and service providers is increasing rapidly. Almost every industry be it e-commerce stores and payment banks to healthcare and food delivery leverages mobile applications to establish effective communication with their prospective customers. So, before you plan to commit to mobile app development to be an important part of the digitally transforming world, it is necessary to thoroughly understand the mobile landscape. Let’s dive deep to understand the importance of mobile applications in transforming the digital world.

    Mobile Apps In Digital World

    Big organizations can have both the site as well as the application. But, when it comes to startups and small businesses, they usually have to pick one. Sometimes, organizations neglect the advantage of having a mobile application. In this blog, we will pin down the benefits of having mobile apps and their importance in businesses.

    1. Better brand recognition: A mobile app for your business increases the chances of having a powerful platform to have a brand image, voice, and brand involvement. Having a dedicated mobile app assists in promoting the brand image with the help of mobile app marketing. It strengthens your brand’s voice with a well-organized interface and improves customer loyalty.

    2. Get a competitive edge: In today’s world, almost all your competitors have a mobile application that helps them to have a competitive edge. To stay ahead of the competition, have a seamless and user-friendly mobile application. Try to incorporate the recent trending features in the app to offer a better user experience.

    3. Easy to use for customers: Mobile apps are considered quite user-friendly because of the structure that it has and their easy user experience. Having a mobile app is highly significant for any business to build a platform for customers to interact and get all the resources at the custom portable application.

    4. AI in mobile apps: Many organizations have started leveraging AI to build mobile apps. AI technologies like Natural Language Generation, Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, Machine Learning, ChatBots are being highly used to give a better user experience to the customers. The AI in mobile apps is used to build better and smarter apps to help secure the customers in a better way.

    5. IoT connecting the world: IoT is not just limited to displaying products, for information sharing or giving customer support, but it is being leveraged by mobile apps to serve the customers in a better and different way. IoT mobile applications are quite successful in making human life comfortable and helping businesses grow.

    6. Convenient and secured payment process: The method of payments has transformed from cash to credit cards and now the popularity of paying via smartphones is increasing quickly. Nowadays, people carrying huge amounts of cash are hardly seen. People have quickly adapted and upgraded themselves by using virtual wallets to make any type of financial transaction.

    7. Time-saving: As compared to websites, mobile apps require less effort and loads faster. This in turn saves time and there is a provision through which many features in the app can be accused when the user is offline. Whereas, mobile websites do not offer any such feature.

    Thus, businesses need to utilize apps creatively to have a competitive edge. For a few industries, mobile apps can be a little new concept, but if you look at its future projection, it will be dominant. It is high time that organizations understand that customers prefer apps due to the convenience it has to offer. This being a reason, tech companies are highly investing in mobile app development. Leverage new technologies like AI and IoT and experience business growth along with customer satisfaction.

  • Microservices Scalability With Kubernetes

    Kubernetes is considered to be a good choice as a platform for deploying the Microservices. You can develop, build, test, deploy, and scale the components of a microservices-based application independently. Kubernetes has containers that enable the portability of the application components and easily get integrated into a larger application.

    The applications you build on microservices can be scaled in various ways. You can scale them to support development with the assistance of larger development teams and can be scaled to perform better. There are several advanced ways to tackle performance issues. In this blog, we will cover some easy techniques to scale the microservices by leveraging Kubernetes:

    • Vertically scaling the entire cluster
    • Horizontally scaling the entire cluster
    • Horizontally scaling individual microservices
    • Elastically scaling the entire cluster

    Let’s check each of these techniques one by one.

    Vertically scaling the cluster

    As your application grows, a point might come where the cluster doesn’t have enough compute, memory or storage to run your application. As you go on adding new microservices or replicating the existing microservices for redundancy. Just max out the nodes in your cluster. Then, monitor this through your Kubernetes dashboard. Now, increase the total amount of resources that are available for the cluster. Either use vertical or horizontal scaling when scaling microservices on a Kubernetes cluster.

    As we grow our application, we might come to a point where our cluster generally doesn’t have enough compute, memory or storage to run our application. As we add new microservices (or replicate existing microservices for redundancy), we will eventually max out the nodes in our cluster. (We can monitor this through our cloud vendor or the Kubernetes dashboard.) Scale up the cluster by increasing the size of virtual machines (VMs) in the node pool.

    Horizontally scaling the cluster

    Apart from scaling the structure vertically, you can also scale it horizontally. Don’t change the size of the VMs, it can be of the same size, just that you can add more VMs. As you add more VMs to the cluster, you can easily spread the load of your application across different computers. Horizontal scaling is less expensive as compared to vertical scaling.

    Horizontally scaling an individual microservice

    As an individual microservices become overloaded which can be monitored in the Kubernetes dashboard. So, when a microservice becomes a performance bottleneck, horizontally scale it to distribute the load properly over multiple instances. You can also scale individual microservices for performance and horizontally scale the microservices for redundancy. You can also create a more fault-tolerant application. With multiple instances, there are always others available to pick up the load in case any single instance fails. This further allows the failed microservice instance to restart and start working again.

    Elastic scaling for the cluster

    Now, talking about elastic scaling it is a technique where you can automatically and dynamically scale your cluster. This will help your cluster to meet different levels of demand. During the low demand, Kubernetes automatically deallocates the resources that aren’t required anymore. And, when the demand rises, new resources are allocated to meet the high workload demands. This saves up the cost because you only end up paying for the needful resources required to handle the application’s workload.
    You can also use the elastic scaling at the cluster level to grow the clusters automatically that are close to their resource limits. In conclusion, elastic scaling works by default, but there are several ways in which you can customize it based on your requirements.

    When you use microservices it gives you granular control over your application’s performance. You can easily measure your microservices’ performance to look for the ones that aren’t performing properly, are either overworked, or are overloaded due to high demand. In such cases using the Kubernetes dashboard to figure out the CPU and memory storage for your microservices is highly recommended.