Snowflakes and solutions: Navigating the data (snow) storm at the Snowflake World Tour 2024

Summary

At the London Snowflake World Tour 2024, Calibo’s Senior Solution Architect, Octavio Martin, demonstrated how Calibo and Snowflake can combine to streamline fragmented data workflows caused by tool silos, manual handoffs, and slow onboarding—challenges that often stretch delivery cycles to six months.

He showcased how integrating Calibo’s Data Fabric Studio with Snowflake drives unified data management and development, radically speeding time-to-production.

Action points: assess your current development lifecycle to uncover silos and delays, adopt unified data orchestration with tools like Calibo plus Snowflake, and run a pilot to measure improvements in speed, governance, and developer collaboration.

With the Snowflake World Tour 2024 transforming London into a winter wonderland of data cloud innovation, Octavio Martin, Senior Solution Architect at Calibo, took the stage. Armed with Calibo’s state-of-the-art solutions, he warmed up the crowd with insights that promised to melt away the frostiest data of challenges. 

With over two decades of experience in software development and more than ten years of architecting cloud solutions, Octavio has witnessed firsthand the challenges engineers face in the dynamic landscapes of technology.  

Octavio presented his session titled “Data Fabric in Action: Leveraging Calibo and Snowflake for Unified Data Management and Development” at the Snowflake World Tour in London on 10 October to a full and captivated house. 

If you missed his presentation, this blog is for you! We share his presentation on how Calibo, in conjunction with Snowflake, offers a streamlined and innovative solution for unified data management and development. 

What are the challenges in today’s software development lifecycle? 

Navigating the complexities of software and data engineering can often feel like traversing an elusive labyrinth, as Octavio describes.  

Throughout the software development lifecycle, many software engineers and data professionals struggle with disparate tools, miscommunication between siloed teams, and cumbersome processes that slow down digital product delivery.  

Common issues include: 

• Siloed processes that isolate teams, forcing interaction through endless tickets. 

• The complexities of a constantly evolving tech stack. 

• Disabling critical guardrails to expedite development, leading to security risks. 

• Lengthy onboarding processes that vary greatly between teams. 

• The redundancy stems from too many dependencies and a lack of standardized, repeatable processes. 

These challenges contribute to a cumbersome digital delivery cycle, with lots of unnecessarily complex, redundant and manual processes, resulting in very slow delivery of digital products.  

From the initial coping until the deployment and training, or user go live, the process can take around 26 weeks, (or six months).  

Why is the digital delivery process slow? 

Slow digital delivery is often due to a lack of clear business ownership (limited time allocation to perform initial scope and lengthy governance structure), heavy resource usage (for onboarding and training), and manual processes.  

For example: 

• Manually provisioning cloud environments and developing non-standard data pipelines contributes to inefficiencies. 

• Engineers frequently reinvent solutions independently, resulting in duplicated data and obsolete standards. 

• Heavy reliance on manual testing methods and outdated deployment methodologies increases the time to market. 

How to leverage Calibo for efficiency and speed?

Calibo addresses these challenges by embedding platform engineering principles into its operations: put guardrails in place, adopt platform engineering practices, and with those guardrails in place you can provide self-service and automations. 

As you can see in the visual below, these platform engineering practices span across the platform set up, including all crucial aspects, security, governance, abstraction, monitoring, self-service, automation, modularity and scalability. 

So, you can improve the developer experience with an Internal Developer Portal. 

This enables your developers to self-serve their needs and supports them during development with integrations to various technologies, allowing them to focus on your business and not the tech. 

Calibo merges software and data engineering with an integrated Data Fabric Studio that allows self-serve and integrates with multiple Data sources and Data lakes. 

You can migrate buckets to different targets, transform this data, apply data quality and once this is done you can promote these pipelines to production with only one click. 

By implementing these three areas as below, Calibo provides a whole view of your software and data development cycle from design to production, with its product release orchestration. 

 
Key points in summary: 

1. Putting guardrails in place: Enforcing security measures and governance through code scanning and user access management. This enables automation of provisioning and CI/CD, ensuring both compliance and speed. 

2. Enhancing developer experience: With Calibo’s Internal Developer Portal, developers can easily access integrations with varied technologies, allowing them to concentrate on core business objectives. 

3. Merging software and data engineering: Calibo’s Data Fabric Studio provides a cohesive platform for engineers to build scalable data pipelines, integrate with diverse data sources, and streamline AI/ML capabilities. 

All these features are backed by Calibo’s platform engineering capabilities that enforce governance and security and integrate with your own tools, which are the tools that you already know and use in your engineering process. 

See our visual below, summarizing our offering and platform engineering principles:  

So your software development cycle looks like this (see racetrack below), you configure the integrations with your tools and technologies such as your cloud and snowflake accounts. 

Define the roles and assign them to your teams and from that moment on, your engineers can begin iterating on this track to build new features for your products.   

By aligning these strategies, Calibo ensures a seamless development cycle from design to production, reducing the time to market by 50%. 

As Gartner says about platform engineering: 

“Platform engineering aims to reduce the cognitive load on product teams by providing self-service tools, capabilities, and processes. A key goal of platform engineering is to provide a developer experience that is demonstrably better than a do-it-yourself approach.” (Taken from the Gartner® report “Adopt Platform Engineering to Improve the Developer Experience” 2023). 

The benefits of integrated data management and software development 

Through its robust engineering platforms, Calibo offers an integrated suite of tools: 

• Internal Developer Portal: Sets development standards while automating environment setup and CI/CD processes. 

• Data Fabric Studio: Empowers engineers to quickly construct data pipelines with AI/ML capabilities using existing tools and platforms. 

With seamless integration and governance, Calibo allows your engineers to focus on innovation, supported by a robust infrastructure. 

Conclusion 

By leveraging Calibo in combination with Snowflake, organizations can significantly enhance their development efficacy and reduce time to market by half. As Gartner notes, effective platform engineering reduces cognitive load by providing superior developer experiences. This approach is more efficient and scalable than building in-house from scratch. 

Our customers confirm these benefits, with NatureSweet’s CIO Noe Angel stating, “Instead of building our own digital ecosystem, which would have taken 12—18 months, we could start within eight weeks thanks to Calibo’s platform.”  

Similarly, Alberto Langle Bornacelli, Global Head of IT Business Relationships at NatureSweet, noted, “With Calibo, we were able to create business-impacting applications which would have taken us more than nine months to develop in just 4-5 months, resulting in faster time-to-value.” 

Calibo and Snowflake offer the guiding light out of the labyrinth of inefficiencies, driving innovation and excellence in software and data engineering. 

Interested to learn more? Check out our platform here or check out our platform factsheets here.

Octavio Martin on stage at the Snowflake World Tour in London 2024.

FAQ

What challenges in data workflows were highlighted at the Snowflake World Tour 2024?
Organizations struggle with tool silos, manual handoffs, and lengthy onboarding processes that can stretch delivery cycles to six months or more.

How does Calibo enhance the use of Snowflake?
By integrating Calibo’s Data Fabric Studio with Snowflake, teams can unify data management and development, automate workflows, and significantly accelerate time-to-production.

What practical steps can organizations take to see results?
Audit existing data workflows for bottlenecks, adopt unified orchestration with Calibo and Snowflake, and start with a pilot project to measure gains in speed, governance, and collaboration.