The Azure well-architected framework is a set of principles to help you achieve excellence in your cloud journey. By designing solutions around these principles, you can build high-quality solutions that are robust and cost effective.
A common challenge faced by our clients is that knowing the well-architected framework is not the same as being able to deliver products to this standard. The step-up in technical maturity can be daunting for businesses to achieve - particularly when applied to cutting-edge technology like the Lakehouse.
That’s why we developed one of our core offerings: the Hydr8 Data Lakehouse Accelerator. The Hydr8 framework enables the deployment of best-in-breed Data Lakehouse at speed, tailored to your situation and supported by our team of Lakehouse, Azure and Data Engineering experts.
This blog post will set out how Hydr8 will help your Lakehouse to deliver on the five pillars of the well-architected framework: cost optimization, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and operational excellence.
Cost optimisation
The cost optimisation pillar is where many of our clients see the most benefit. The primary cost saving from adopting the Hydr8 framework is the reduction in development time. The framework has been rolled out across many business settings and can be configured far faster than building from scratch. Moreover, the framework makes it easier to achieve cost efficiency from your resources. This might be saving on storage and database costs by leveraging the ACID transactions and low-cost storage of Azure data lake storage to move away from expensive database solutions. Saving can also come in the form of tuning your compute to reflect your workloads. A final but important cost improvement is faster time to make use of your data. Your analytical data should play a key role in shaping business decisions but waiting months or even years to see the benefit of that data is too slow. Hydr8's proven path to delivery can help you quickly focus on succeeding in your core business.
Security
The Hydr8 framework has been designed with security in mind and offers strong guardrails around the security of your Lakehouse. During the rollout, Hydr8 will implement a number of security-related patterns from network segmentation, private endpoints, DNS names, and logging, through to role-based data access control (RBAC) and ensuring that data is encrypted both at rest and in transit. As your team familiarises themselves with the Lakehouse architecture, they can learn from these patterns that have been battle-tested across a wide range of business contexts.
Performance efficiency
Hydr8 is built around the decoupled compute and storage that makes the Lakehouse architecture so effective. The distributed processing power of spark can scale to whatever size your data requires while still delivering fast performance. The Hydr8 framework helps to structure your dataflows to maximise the performance of blob storage while still ensuring ease of maintenance. Its configurable nature means that you can adapt to changing demands over time. The advanced indexing, caching, and auto-tuning features of Delta can further improve the performance of your workflows.
Reliability
Achieving reliability is challenging when building a Lakehouse from scratch. A best-in-breed Lakehouse has many features that need to work in concert for the platform to function reliably. Hydr8 helps to bring these components together in a proven configuration to form a robust platform for your data. Your Hydr8 architecture will leverage Delta Lake for its great reliability benefits including ACID transactions, schema enforcement, and data versioning/time travel.
Operational excellence
The final pillar is operational excellence. This is another area in which our clients see enormous benefits from the Hydr8 framework. Hydr8 is not just the architectural components needed to build a Lakehouse. Instead, the framework takes a holistic view and recognises the need for people, process, and technology to work in concert. Your Hydr8 deployment includes automated tests and logging while Hydr8's metadata-driven pipelines mean that your data pipelines are automated by design, removing manual steps. More than that, a key principle of Advancing Analytics is that we view clients as collaborators. Including your development teams as collaborators in every step of the implementation helps to ensure that the people who will own and run the solution into the future are fully empowered to succeed.
Hydr8 can simplify your Data Lakehouse automation by expediting the development of your Data Lakehouse with our tried and tested framework. We really think this can revolutionise your data journey, and would love to talk with you about the possibilities of your Data Lakehouse. You can read more about Hydr8 here, or reach out for a discussion here.
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Author
Connor Quinn