Ahana’s Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Dipti Borkar, and Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer, Steven Mih predict major developments in cloud, data analytics, databases and data warehousing in 2022.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to propel businesses to make strategic data-driven shifts. Today more companies are augmenting the traditional cloud data warehouse with cloud data lakes for much greater flexibility and affordability. Combined with more Analytics and AI applications, powerful, cloud-native open source technologies are empowering data platform teams to analyze that data faster, easier and more cost-effectively in SaaS environments.

Dipti Borkar, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, outlines the major trends she sees on the horizon in 2022:

• OpenFlake – the Open Data Lake for Warehouse Workloads – Data warehouses like Snowflake are the new Teradata with proprietary formats. 2022 will be about the Open Data Lake Analytics stack that allows for open formats, open source, open cloud and no vendor lock-in.
• More Open Source Behind Analytics & AI – As the momentum behind the Open Data Lake Analytics stack to power Analytics & AI applications continues to grow, we’ll see a bigger focus on leveraging Open Source to address flexibility and cost limitations from traditional enterprise data warehouses. Open source cloud-native technologies like Presto, Apache Spark, Superset, and Hudi will power AI platforms at a larger scale, opening up new use cases and workloads.
• Database Engineering is Cool Again – With the rise of the Data Lake tide, 2022 will make database engineering cool again. The database benchmarking wars will be back and the database engineers who can build a data lake stack with data warehousing capabilities (transactions, security) but without the compromises (lock-in, cost) will win.
• A Post-Pandemic Data-Driven Strategic Shift to Out-Of-The-Box Solutions – The pandemic has brought about massive change across every industry and the successful “pandemic” companies were able to pivot from their traditional business model. In 2022 we’ll see less time spent on managing complex, distributed systems and more time focused on delivering business-driven innovation. That means more out-of-the-box cloud solution providers that reduce cloud complexities so companies can focus on delivering value to their customers.
• More SaaS, More Containers – When it comes to 2022, abstracting the complexities of infrastructure will be the name of the game. Containers provide scalability, portability, extensibility and availability advantages, and technologies like Kubernetes alleviate the pain around building, delivering, and scaling containerized apps. As the SaaS space continues to explode, we’ll see even more innovation in the container space.

Steven Mih, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, outlines a major trend he sees on the horizon in 2022:

• Investment & Adoption of Managed Services for Open Source Will Soar – More companies will adopt managed services for open source in 2022 as more cloud-native open source technologies become mainstream (Spark, Kafka, Presto, Hudi, Superset). Open source companies offering easier-to-use, managed service versions of installed software enable companies to take advantage of these powerful systems without the resource overhead so they can focus on business-driven innovation.