The 3 Biggest Cloud Challenges: Athena, Redshift, and Multi-Cloud

We’re looking forward to this year’s AWS re:Invent from November 27 to December 1 in Las Vegas. Ahead of the conference, we wanted to share the top three trends we’re seeing in the market based on the hundreds of companies we’ve spoken to about the challenges they face processing inter-company data. Operating in a Multi-Cloud environment, working with Athena, and Redshift integration seem to top the list.

Preparing Data for Athena with Nexla

Amazon Athena is great for the ability to analyze data directly from Amazon S3. Using standard SQL, there’s no need for any kind of setup, data ingesting, or complex ETL processes— Athena allows you to project your schema on to your data at the time you execute a query. However, Athena charges you based on data scanned per query. In order to cut costs and get a better performance, companies are encouraged to partition, compress, or convert data to Apache Parquet to use Athena efficiently…That’s a lot of work.

Nexla takes away that grunt work. Nexla can convert JSON, XML, CSV, or Avro into Parquet (or any other format you might need), all with a simple click. Data pipes can be up and running in a day, delivering data to Athena in Parquet.

Integrating Resources with Redshift

Last week we announced our integration with Amazon Redshift. Redshift is great for analytics teams. You can analyze all of your data with SQL or use your favorite BI tool. But getting data into Redshift can be a pain. There is always a long list of APIs to integrate and maintain, and not a lot of engineering resources to go around.

That’s why Poshmark was so happy to discover Nexla. Within a few days, Poshmark integrated the Desk.com API into Redshift using Nexla. They were then able to run Looker on top of it to perform new analyses. “I was happy to find a software solution to solve the problem. It allows us to scale without disrupting anything else,” said Barkha Saxena, Poshmark VP, Analytics.

Nexla now supports Amazon Redshift integration. With a simple configuration in the Nexla UI, stream your data from tables in Redshift, or map attributes to tables to send to Redshift. Redshift integration has never been easier.

Multi-Cloud Brings Multi-Challenges

As many as 85% of enterprises currently have a multi-cloud strategy. Multi-cloud isn’t going anywhere, especially as companies try to cut costs and prevent over-reliance. However, with your data in multiple places, how are you bringing your data together to drive value?

The multi-cloud reality is one of the main reasons we were inspired to build Nexla. Companies increasingly need to move data between cloud environments, optimizing for cost and speed. With Nexla, our goal is to make it easier for companies to manage their multi-cloud data.

If you are in the area, please drop us a note at sales@nexla.com to meet up! We would love to talk to you about what Nexla can do for your Data Operations needs.

See you there!