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How big can your data lake get? To quote the old saying (and to answer a question with a question), how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Scalability is best thought of as “the ability to expand capacity, workload, and missions without having to go back to the drawing board and start all over.” Your data lake will almost always be a cloud-based solution (see Figure 1-2). Cloud-based platforms give you, in theory, infinite scalability for your data lake. New servers and storage devices (discs, solid state devices, and so on) can be incorporated into your data lake on demand, and the software services manage and control these new resources along with those that you’re already using. Your data lake contents can then expand from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes, and then to exabytes, and then zettabytes, and even into the ginormousbyte range. (Just kidding about that last one.)

FIGURE 1-2: Cloud-based data lake solutions.

Cloud providers give you pricing for data storage and access that increases as your needs grow or decreases if you cut back on your functionality. Basically, your data lake will be priced on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Some of the very first data lakes that were built in the Hadoop environment may reside in your corporate data center and be categorized as on-prem (short for on-premises, meaning “on your premises”) solutions. But most of today’s data lakes are built in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure cloud environments. Given the ever-increasing popularity of cloud computing, it’s highly unlikely that this trend of cloud-based data lakes will reverse for a long time, if ever.

As long as Amazon, Microsoft, and other cloud platform providers can keep expanding their existing data centers and building new ones, as well as enhancing the capabilities of their data management services, then your data lake should be able to avoid scalability issues.

A multiple-component data lake architecture (see Chapter 4) further helps overcome performance and capacity constraints as your data lake grows in size and complexity, providing even greater scalability.