GoodData - Towards a cloud-based BI Platform as a Service

Customer!Analytics!Through!Cloud!BI

Towards!a!cloud"based!BI!Platform!as!a!ServicePrague, June 21 – 24 2010

Jaroslav [email protected]

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Jaroslav Gergic

VP Engineering, GoodData

[email protected]

@gooddata

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GoodData’s!Founding!Vision:!Customer!Analytics

• The center of gravity is gradually

shifting from ERP to CRM

• The BI activities should be centered

around Customer!Analytics as

opposed to General Ledger

• Customer Analytics use cases and

data are fundamentally different

than ERP data and use cases.

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Customer!Analytics:!Flexibility,!Versatility!and!People

Customer Analytics use cases and data are

fundamentally different ...

• constant innovation– the dynamics of everchanging needs

– ad hoc analysis, hypothesis testing

• decentralization– driven by line of business or department

– self-service, broad user base

• disparate external data sources– impossible to enforce strict data quality

– cross-source analysis is the key use case

• variable lifespan– from perpetual to single purpose

– low risk, time-to-value

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Customer!Analytics!vs.!Cloud!Architecture

• “KPIs” of a Customer Analytics:– time to value

– risk level (initial price + operating costs)

– agility, flexibility, usability

• Computing cloud– an ideal environment for a BI deployment

because of the low-utilization vs. high-

peak-performance-demand nature of BI

– allows to increase HW resource utilization

• BI Platform as a Service– tools and APIs reducing time-to-value from

months and weeks to days or hours

– takes care of all IT operations aspects

– takes care of customer support

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Building!the!BI!Platform!as!a!Service!in!the!Cloud

“Computing cloud is an ideal environment for a multi tenant BI deployment because of the low-

utilization vs. high-peak-performance-demand nature of BI”

• The traditional BI tools are not suitable for cloud deployments– they are too complex on the upstream side

– they are not multi-tenant

• Developing a complete generic cloud-ready BI stack from scratch is a

substantial challenge due to the enormous breath and depth of the BI domain– ETL, modeling, metrics, reports, dashboards, collaboration, security

– Large data volumes, unpredictable peak loads

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GoodData!Cloud!BI!Platform

• Open standards-based APIs– HTTP, REST, FTP

• Rich user experience– JavaScript, AJAX, interactive

charts

• Flexible application layer– a new release every two weeks

• Robust ROLAP engine– MAQL (Multi-dimensional

Analytical Query Language)

– Fluid data model (Attributes, Facts,

Metrics, Hierarchies)

– highly efficient MAQL-to-SQL

decomposition and caching

– suits both operational reporting as

well as ad-hoc analysis

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GoodData!Cloud!BI!Platform!–!Core!Concepts

• Project = data mart– a unit of management and distribution

– deployment: as easy as “New File”

• User Information– security boundary – a “walled garden”

• Project Data– raw data: numbers and classifications

• Project Metadata– metrics, filters, reports, dashboards

– LDM, PDM, operational state

– event trace, audit log

• Cached Data– pre-aggregated data

– materialized slices and dices

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GoodData!Cloud!BI!Platform!–!Multi!Tenant

• Multi-Tenant Platform– born on Amazon Web services

– stateless web application layer

– session-less processing layer

– redundant storage

• Horizontal Scaling– a pre-configured node type for each role

– shared-nothing architecture between

nodes of the same type

– nodes of each type can be provisioned

on!demand independently of others

• Horizontal Partitioning– first-level driven by project separation

– with columnar storage second-level

partitioning not needed ~100M rows

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www.gooddata.com/trust

Operating!Cloud!BI!Platform!=!Continuous!Innovation

Statistics as of June 2010:

• 2,713 projects, 1,344 dashboards– 19,086 reports, 41,213 metrics

• 3.5K+ reports run per business day– report calculations, incl. dashboards

• 5M platform events a day– in the audit events trail

While continuously innovating:

• production release ~ 2 weeks– 10 releases so far in 2010

• without adverse impacts on uptime

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Thank!You

http://www.gooddata.com/

https://secure.gooddata.com/

http://developer.gooddata.com/

http://support.gooddata.com/