Episode 3: Clearing the Data Path for Innovation at Scale

The idea of having “The right tool for the job” applies across domains. Two thousand years ago Greek mathematician Archimedes is reported to have said “Give me a place to stand, and the right lever, and I could lift the earth.”


Fast forward to today’s cloud-centric environment, and application developers are nodding in enthusiastic agreement with Archimedes; and while things may be considered abundantly more complicated than in 250 BC., Google Cloud partner Aiven has made it their job to streamline some of the complications that can inhibit cloud-centric application development.

“Our mission here at Aiven is quite simple,” says Troy Sellers, presales Solution Architect at Aiven. “It’s to make the developer’s life easier. And when you’re a company that is looking at driving innovations or transformations into the cloud, for example, they need the right tools to support that activity.”

Aiven provides open source solutions that stand up a cloud based data infrastructure, freeing developers to focus on high value projects, and in the process, accelerate cloud migration and modernization.

“Having the right tool is just as important as having the ideas, because it allows the people with the ideas to get on and focus on the things that are important,” says Sellers in Google Cloud’s podcast series “The Principles of a Cloud Data Strategy.”

Dealing with complexity

As digital transformation evolves into broader modernization efforts, organizations face a common milestone — they need to expand their cloud-based services, but they lack the staff and skills to do so at scale.

It’s not just a resource question, though. Sellers says, “The challenges today, they’re worlds apart from the days gone by where I used to be building applications myself. I remember, we used to go and talk to customers, when big data was like a gigabyte.”

Today’s modern data and application development stacks contain many moving parts, and different tiers of logic — not to mention the sheer volume of data in play, the need to be aware of regulatory compliance and security issues, and the pressure to keep up with today’s expectations of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CICD) for applications.

“There’s this expectation on developers that releases go from, rather than once every three months, to once every month, to every lunchtime at 11 o’clock,” Sellers says. “Time to market is just getting faster and faster and faster. And you definitely are in a race with your competitors to do that.”

“This is probably one of the main reasons that developers turn to companies like Google Cloud and Aiven for fully managed services, because it just takes a lot of that headache out of managing that. And they can get to market really, really fast.”

The Open Source Advantage

Aiven has leaned into Open Source for cloud data infrastructure since its inception in 2016. The advantages: cost savings, agility, no vendor lock-in, productivity, and efficiency.

“We manage database services for our customers, database services in the cloud, open source technologies such as Postgres, MySQL, Apache, Kafka,” says Sellers.  “We help customers adopt those services so they can focus on what they do best, which is building technology for their customers.”

Check “The Principles of a Cloud Data Strategy”  podcast series from Google Cloud on Google podcasts, Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.