What is a Cloud Data Engineer?
A cloud data engineer manages and supports a company’s computing resources in the cloud. Many newer companies were developed on the cloud or have usually fully adopted the cloud. A cloud data engineer at such a company ensures the company’s mission-critical applications, workloads, and customer-facing tools are all being optimized on the cloud. For more established companies, the cloud data engineer is also responsible for migrating the company’s legacy on-premises computing systems to the cloud.
Becoming a cloud data engineer involves significant formal training including a degree in fields such as computer science, data science, computer engineering, or management information systems. As data has continued to grow exponentially over time, more and more companies are turning to the cloud to host their data. Cloud infrastructure and cloud deployment models have evolved just as much to keep up with the enormous amounts of data that is being generated daily. Formal education is no longer enough to be competitive in the field of cloud data engineering. Additional certifications are now also required to break into the field.
Major cloud service providers such as AWS and Google Cloud provide a variety of certification courses in cloud computing, cloud architecture and cloud data management. It is important to be well versed in these areas to be successful as a cloud data engineer.
Your data is how your company remains competitive in the marketplace. Your in-house team of software engineers are continuously optimizing your application. This ensures your customers continue to have a seamless experience with your product, service and website. Migrating your on-premises computing infrastructure to the cloud will be no easy feat. How much of your engineering team’s time can you really spare to support your cloud migration process, and cloud data management strategy once on the cloud? Is having high-end cloud infrastructure adding to your bottom line? Or is gaining the most insights from your data really what you’re looking to gain from the cloud?
Support Your Cloud Data Engineers By Adding Silk To Your Stack
Moving to the cloud is a complicated process that may involve refactoring – or rewriting – the applications that you’ve spent years perfecting for your ideal customer. Skilled cloud data engineers don’t come cheap. With the rate at which data and cloud computing evolves, you also have to invest in their ongoing training to ensure they continue to bring the highest value to your organization. Your cloud data engineers are going to need all the tools they can get in order to move your mission-critical workloads to the cloud. They’re going to have to deal with refactoring, lower performance, latency, and compatibility issues. But with Silk, they’ll be able to be successful.
Once on the cloud, you may be surprised at the decline in performance compared to being on-premises. The public cloud is a shared environment by design. Cloud data service providers throttle speeds for the benefit of all users. The only lever available to your in-house cloud data engineers is to provision additional cloud resources to regain the performance that you’re used to. On the cloud however, every byte counts.
The Silk Cloud DB Virtualization Platform is a virtualized layer that sits between your data and the cloud. Silk breaks the link between computing power and performance on the cloud. As a result, your engineers don’t need to overprovision cloud resources to achieve peak performance.
Silk offers rich, enterprise data services such as zero-footprint snapshots, data reduction, deduplication, and thin provisioning. These features are not available in native cloud alone. Silk’s data services help to minimize the amount of cloud resources you ultimately need, which in turn, helps to keep your cloud costs under control.
With Silk you can quickly migrate your applications to the cloud, mitigate the risks of refactoring, and get the high level of performance you need at a price that won’t blow your budget.
Cloud Data Engineer FAQs
What is the value of a cloud data engineer?
A cloud data engineer is a highly specialized professional who can best navigate your company’s computing resources on the cloud. A proficient cloud data engineer will assist the business in selecting the cloud infrastructure that best suits the needs of the business. A public cloud will be the most cost-effective option for many businesses. If security is a concern, a private cloud may be a better fit. However, a private cloud comes at a steep cost. A hybrid cloud or multi cloud may be the way to go to gain the best of both worlds.
What is the difference between a cloud data engineer and a data engineer?
A cloud data engineer manages the cloud infrastructure that hosts a company’s applications, workloads, and data. A data engineer mines and organizes vast amounts of data to gain insights that further the mission of your business. This data can be hosted on an on-premises server, or more commonly on the cloud.
How important is it for data engineers to know about cloud computing?
In the past, most computing was performed using on-premises servers. With the explosion of cloud computing, a data engineer needs to be well versed in the functionality of the cloud, since that’s where the data that they use for their role will most likely be hosted. The cloud offers virtually unlimited scalability and flexibility. The amount of data being stored only grows with each year. To be successful, a data engineer needs to understand how to extract valuable insights from larger and more disparate data sets that are being stored on a variety of cloud deployment models.