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ETL Modernization: Reduce Migration Timelines and Achieve Scalable, Real-Time Data Processing

Augment
AWS
Wavicle Glue Converter
02 Mar 2022
4 min read

Ranjith Ramachandran

Vice President, Technology

The cloud evolution is no longer a movement for modern business, it’s an inescapable reality. A vastly greater amount of data sources, the volume of customer data, and disruptions to the supply chain call for companies to fully utilize the cloud and its unlimited compute and capacity. To keep up, organizations need real-time data processing for scalability and to empower decision-makers with data faster. But for many, a barrier for cloud migration, cloud utilization and data integration remains — in the form of traditional extract, transform, and load (ETL) platforms. At Wavicle, we create ETL migration and modernization strategies at a holistic level based on business processes and goals, use cases, and current technology stacks. For AWS users, AWS Glue is a serverless and scalable data integration option.

Traditional ETL weaknesses

Traditional ETL processes consist of the development of batched data pipelines for on-premise sources tied to conventional hardware infrastructure. While still necessary today, the technology isn’t for high-speed processing. Legacy ETL platforms are mostly designed for relational databases and other traditional data sources. For today’s exponentially increased pace, volume, and multi-source data, legacy ETL platforms do not have the agility to transform data at the speed for loading into a data warehouse or data lake. Beyond the inability to keep up with the momentum of modern big data, legacy ETL platforms come with other inherent shortcomings.

Time

Legacy ETL platforms are slow from a user perspective. When a company has thousands or tens of thousands of ETL jobs for moving data or applications to the cloud, timelines become a serious pain point.

Cost

For platforms like Informatica, Datastage, or other legacy ETL solutions, licensing costs present a major financial burden for growing organizations. These tools contain their engines for data transformation, requiring investment into servers and storage. With modern ETL platforms like AWS Glue, the vendor absorbs the infrastructure cost.

Lack of open-source

Legacy ETL platforms are not designed as open-source and subsequently, have serious limitations for integrating with other open-source technology like Databricks. According to an IBM survey, open-source software was rated equal to or better than proprietary software by 94% of respondents.

Scalability

Legacy ETL platforms were not designed for the cloud. This means they aren’t capable of unlimited scalability, an inherent value pillar for the cloud. The lack of cloud design also means many tools won’t support cloud-base.

Maintenance

Maintenance, upgrades, and renewals of legacy ETL platforms require dedicated managers. These time-consuming processes and operations drain internal team resources and bandwidth. With AWS Glue and other modern ETL tools, most services are managed.

Process limitations

Traditional ETL tools often have a limited number of allowed processes for users.

Mistakes in ETL modernization

Organizations across various industries have already moved to ETL modernization. At Wavicle, we see various mistakes from strategy to implementation.

Initial setup and scalability

“The cloud does it all for us right?” Eh, not so much. It still takes a tremendous amount of manual work to set up processes in the cloud for modern ETL platforms. Organizations often overlook the cost and bandwidth associated with building these processes. Beyond setup, we often see a lack of internal expertise and experience in how scalability works when it comes to modern ETL platforms and an organization’s preferred cloud.

Capabilities of the legacy platform

If not accounted for during an initial strategy phase, organizations can overlook capabilities that were widely used by their internal teams within their prior platform. This can stall the rapid utilization that is expected with a modern ETL platform.

On-premises connectivity

Some modern ETL tools do not support connectivity to on-premise systems at all. If this isn’t accounted for and addressed, organizations can face a major ingestion challenge with their remaining on-premises systems.

WIT Leader

Ranjith Ramachandran

Vice President, Technology View all my Posts

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ETL Modernization: Reduce Migration Timelines and Achieve Scalable, Real-Time Data Processing

Ranjith Ramachandran

Traditional ETL weaknesses

Time

Cost

Lack of open-source

Scalability

Maintenance

Process limitations

Mistakes in ETL modernization

Initial setup and scalability

Capabilities of the legacy platform

On-premises connectivity

WIT Leader

Ranjith Ramachandran

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