Moving to cloud? What are the benefits of Talend Data Fabric in the cloud?

[TalendSolutionExpert]

Does this sound familiar to you? “As of recently our company’s cloud strategy has accelerated, and this now includes moving existing IT operations and applications to the cloud.”

You are not alone: According to IDC, 70% of new enterprise applications will be developed “Cloud Native” by 2021, and Cloud “Megaplatforms” will be the destination of choice for 80% of workloads by 2022. Cloud adoption is racing ahead and “No Industry Is Immune” (HBR). Why? Companies are looking for ways to turn raw data into usable assets, innovate faster, transform the customer experience, and dramatically reduce cost and risk. Cloud is a key enabler for these efforts, and Talend provides native integration with the newest cloud technologies to facilitate our customers’ cloud adoption.

Many customers with Talend on-prem deployments are experiencing a corporate cloud shift and are considering whether they should migrate their self-managed Talend platform to a Talend in the cloud model. This blog post provides some insights on Talend’s cloud-based platform.

We also highly recommend this On-Demand Webinar - Why Moving to Talend in the Cloud is the Right Choice, where Talend experts provide a thorough discussion on the advantage of making the move, as well as a detailed discussion on the architecture and migration process.

Content:

• What's special about Talend's cloud-based platform?
• What are the operational implications of migrating to Talend in the cloud?
• What are the benefits of making the move?
• Benefits of Talend in the cloud vs. on-premises
• Is Talend in the cloud the right choice for me?

What's special about Talend's cloud-based platform?

The main value pillars for Talend Data Fabric in the cloud are innovation, TCO, scale, and security. Innovation is always a step ahead on the cloud platform with new monthly released features, such as collaborative workspaces, SDLC enhancements, new public APIs, security enhancements, data inventory, and self-service apps for new user personas (for example: Data Loader, API Designer, Pipeline Designer). Automatic platform upgrades make the new innovations available to users immediately with a consistent security profile. And thanks to its flexible, cloud architecture, TCO is always lower, and the platform can grow with you as your data and operational needs evolve.

What are the operational implications of migrating to Talend in the cloud?

As with any move to cloud, the road from Talend on-prem to Talend in the cloud involves some initial setup, some migrations, and maybe some operational changes. But you can create the cloud platform in a matter of minutes — no new servers or databases required — and Talend provides tools that help migrate environments, users, and configurations.

Talend’s Getting Started Guide explains the initial setup steps: Log in to Talend Management Console (TMC), create users, create “environments” and “workspaces” and pair your “Remote Engines”. Once the platform is configured, you migrate “Jobs” using Talend Studio. The process is essentially the same as using Talend on-prem, except that you now “publish to cloud.” That’s the operational impact at a high level, and you can find additional details in Self-service Talend Migration: Moving from On-Premises to the Cloud.

What are the benefits of making the move?

If you Google “cloud benefits” you get more than 1 billion results! Any adoption of cloud technology can be strategic. The cloud’s ability to scale up and down as needed makes cloud platforms cost-effective and lowers TCO. Cloud platforms generally roll out new features at a faster cadence. In addition to operational benefits, they give businesses freedom to experiment. These generic cloud benefits all apply to Talend in the cloud.

With Talend Data Fabric in the cloud, Talend manages the platform. Users have the flexibility to create environments and workspaces on the platform while Talend takes care of maintenance and upgrades, and ensures that the platform scales to meet each organization’s needs. This results in lower TCO compared to on-prem, always.

Talend’s cloud platform offers many cloud-only innovations that make it attractive for adoption by existing on-prem users who are reconsidering future operations, API development, SDLC improvements, enterprise cloud-enablement, and “grows with you” infrastructure initiatives for optimizing TCO.

Benefits of Talend in the cloud vs. on-premises

Talend’s cloud platform provides several innovative features and advantages over Talend on-premises, which include:

• Talend in the cloud is a fully managed high availability (HA) platform as a service (PaaS), with Talend managing all hardware maintenance and upgrades, so customers can focus on developing and improving their data integration projects.
   
• Talend in the cloud is continuously upgraded so you get new features as soon as they’re available. And as the platform is upgraded, it maintains compatibility with earlier versions of Talend Studio, so you have the flexibility to plan Talend Studio updates at the convenience of your teams.
   
• Cloud Engines and Remote Engines replace traditional Talend Runtime Job Servers, for low-touch, flexible, HA hybrid architectures.
   
• Remote Engines perform job execution inside your private network, are unlimited in size, and can handle unlimited number of Jobs. They can be clustered and can be deployed on-prem or in-cloud. They’re easy to create from your AWS or Azure marketplace account. And you can pair, re-pair, and scale them via the Talend Cloud Management Console Public API. You can use allotted “tokens” to flexibly create Cloud Engines and Remote Engines with unlimited changes.
   
• Environments and promotion pipeline: Talend’s cloud platform allows unlimited “Environments” per Talend Management Console and promotion of Jobs between environments using “promotion pipelines” and cloud native CI/CD methods. Talend Management Console makes it easy to employ best practices for SDLC.
   
• API Services: Talend’s fully integrated API Designer and API Tester capabilities, which enable “API first” fast API development, are only available in Talend’s cloud platform. Our managed platform allows developers to design and document API services and easily publish to third-party API gateways.
   
• Migrate existing Jobs as needed over time: A single Talend Studio client can publish Jobs to both on-prem job servers and to Talend’s cloud platform, allowing for gradual migration to full cloud.
   
• Pipeline Designer is included with most subscriptions: From Talend Management Console, you have access to this new iPaaS web-based design tool, whose user interface enables easy creation of pipelines for business users. You can combine cloud connectors, datasets, and batch and stream functions into your pipelines and run them on the cloud with Pipeline Designer.
   
• Easy path to corporate data quality and data inventory: Existing on-prem users moving to Talend in the cloud will benefit immediately from included self-service applications such as Data Preparation and Data Stewardship. By adding these self-service data quality functions to your pipelines you can be better prepared to meet the requirements of data privacy regulations like the GDPR.
   
• New user types foster a more collaborative approach to data: The new apps and functionality available only in Talend’s cloud platform empower new, non-technical users to take advantage of Talend’s capabilities and make data management and data quality a more collaborative approach within organizations. The result is more access to higher quality data by more users, including: TMC admins, pipeline designers, data loaders, API designers and testers, API Services developers, and business users responsible for data preparation and data stewardship.
   
• User management made easy: Talend Management Console makes it easy to manage all subscriptions, users, Talend “applications,” and resources centrally, from one pane of glass. With it, you can flexibly assign “roles” and “privileges” to users. For example, you can control user access across “workspaces”, “environments”, and “pipelines” for enhanced security and better teamwork.
   
• Talend in the cloud is ready for the cloud-native future where you have the agility to adopt new innovations faster and the flexibility to do it in a more cost effective manner. For example, you can go serverless using containers and adopt a cloud native CI/CD approach. Talend’s cloud roadmap includes more features for API creation and operations, integrated data catalog and data inventory functions, and deeper integration with modern clusters like Databricks and Qubole.

Is Talend in the cloud the right choice for me?

Although its iPaaS model is a different approach, much stays the same operationally with Talend in the cloud. Existing Jobs can remain unchanged and can continue to run as they do today. Although Talend is confident that our cloud platform is the right choice for the vast majority of customers, existing Talend customers should discuss this topic with their Talend representative, review existing and consider future strategic objectives, and determine whether they will benefit by moving to cloud.

Not sure yet? Watch the webinar to make up your mind.