Architecting Data-Intensive SaaS Applications

Chapter 2. What to Look For in a Modern Data Platform

In order to take advantage of the rapidly growing demand for data applications, product teams need to invest in data platforms to gather, analyze, and work with large amounts of data in near real or real time. These platforms must support different data types and structures, be able to interoperate with external tools and data sources, and scale efficiently to manage the demands of customers without wasting resources.

If your data platform does not support these capabilities, your engineering team will spend significant time developing and maintaining systems to service these needs, reducing the amount of resources available for application development. In this chapter you will learn what to look for in a modern data platform to ensure engineering effort can remain focused on building your product. We will dive into the use case–specific needs covered in “Application Health and Security”, as well as other areas of importance for data platform assessment. By the end of this chapter you will understand what features to look for in a data platform for building data applications and why they are important.

Benefits of Cloud Environments

It is difficult to meet the challenges of modern data applications with legacy, on-premises data platforms. It takes significant time and resources to bring an on-premises system online, requiring physical machines to be purchased, configured, and deployed. With cloud environments you can bring ...