Going single cloud, multi cloud and/or cloud agnostic at Data Mass Gdańsk (Oct 5th)

Data Mass Gdańsk 2023 is fast approaching. Please save the date - October 5th, 2023, in Gdańsk.

The conference has an impressive lineup of presentations, with over 40 speakers delivering 25+ talks. See the agenda.

One of the central themes revolves around cloud. In this article, we will describe the cloud approaches that various companies that will present at the conferences have.

Pros and cons of a single-cloud & a multi-cloud

According to the State of Cloud 2023 more than 65% of organisations currently operate within multi cloud environments, with 20% saying they’re actively pursuing an additional cloud platform for their cloud environment. Most common reasons include:

• enabling flexibility at the department, team or project level
• leveraging “best of breed” cloud-native services
• avoid vendor lock-in
• reduce or optimize cloud computing costs
• acquisitions and inorganic growth

However, using just a single cloud brings benefits such as operational management simplicity, finding talents more easily, more homogeneous data/ML data stack and toolkits.

Why going going cloud-agnostic

On the other hand, to leverage the best possible technologies, simplify their data/ML stack and find talents more easily, companies also use … cloud agnostic technologies.

The most popular ones are Kafka, Spark, Flink, dbt, mlFlow, Grafana. Many of them can come from specific vendors (e.g. Confluent, Databricks, dbtLabs), or from hyperscalers (e.g. Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink) or from the open-source community (e.g. https://flink.apache.org).?

In my opinion, the cloud is actually something that helps open-source projects to thrive and it provides a commercial business model to many of them. Four years ago, I presented my views at InfoShare conference.

Clouds in Gdańsk

At Data Mass Gdansk, we will have a number of presentations where a single cloud, multi cloud or cloud agnostic approach is used to build data platforms and ML/AI solutions. For example:

• Pearson , the world’s learning company, is using a multi cloud approach in building their trustworthy AI systems for millions of users worldwide.

• DNV is using cloud agnostic approach with Spark to track and analyse the positions of approximately 200,000 ships worldwide every day (they run Spark in Databricks environment on Microsoft Azure)

• FREENOW , one of Europe's largest multi-mobility companies, use a cloud agnostic approach to build their ML(OPs) platform that consists of tools such as MLFlow, BentoML, Docker, and Kubernetes.

• GetInData | Part of Xebia Data builds production-grade MLOps Platform powered by cloud-native and/or open-source technologies such as Kedro, MLflow, and Terraform - regardless of what cloud you use. You can see it's preview here:

• The Stepstone Group will describe their event-driven architecture in Data Mesh implementation. In this use-case, they use AWS, but with cloud agnostic components such as Kafka.?On the other hand, Stepstone has a portfolio of more than 20 brands and businesses across more than 30 countries around the globe, so I personally think that perhaps some of their brands use various clouds.

As far as I know, there will be also many presentations where use-cases run in a single cloud e.g. Nike, Volkswagen Group, Bolt, AVON - all of them are interesting to watch and learn what are the selection criteria for such companies to decide with cloud, or what components (e.g. open-source or closed-source) they use to choose to build stack.?

Whats next?

For a more comprehensive look at the conference's agenda and additional details, visit the Data Mass Gdańsk 2023 Agenda.

If you would like to attend the conference, I also have something for you. Please, use the discount code "GETINDATA10" for a 10% off on conference attendance.

If a group of min. 5 people from your company would like to attend, you can use the discount code "GETINDATA20" for a 20% off on conference attendance.