Читать книгу Data Lakes For Dummies - Alan R. Simon - Страница 40

Maybe you’ve heard of a B-52. No, not a member of the American new wave music group (so don’t start singing “Love Shack”) but rather the U.S. Air Force plane.

The B-52 first became operational in 1952. The normal life span for an Air Force plane is around 28 years before it’s shuffled off to retirement, which means that B-52s should’ve gone out of service around 1980. Instead, the B-52 will eventually be retired sometime in the 2050s. That’s a hundred years — an entire century!

However, a B-52 today bears only a slight resemblance to one made in the ’50s or ’60s. Sure, if you were to put one of the original B-52s side by side with one of today’s planes, the two aircraft would look nearly identical. But the engines, the avionics, the flight controls … pretty much every major subsystem has been significantly upgraded and replaced in each operational B-52 at least a couple times over the years.

Better yet, a B-52 isn’t just some old plane that you may see flying at an airshow but that otherwise doesn’t have much purpose due to the passage of time. Not only is the B-52 still a viable, operational plane, but its mission has continually expanded over the years thanks to new technologies and capabilities.

In fact, you can think of a B-52 as sort of a bionic airplane. Its components and subsystems have been — and will continue to be — swapped out and substantially upgraded on a regular basis, giving the plane a planned life span of almost four times the normal longevity of the typical Air Force plane. Talk about an awe-inspiring feat of engineering!

However, all those enhancements and modifications to the B-52 happened gradually over time, not all at once. Plus, the changes were all carefully planned and implemented with longevity and continued viability top of mind.

Your data lake should follow the same model: a “bionic” enterprise-scale analytical data environment that regularly incorporates new and improved technologies to replace older ones, as well as enhancing overall function. You almost certainly won’t get an entire century’s usage out of a data lake that you build today, but if you do a good job with your planning and implementation, 10 or even 20 years of value from your data lake is certainly achievable.

More important, your data lake won’t be just another aging system hanging around long past when it should’ve been retired. You almost certainly have plenty of those antiquated systems stashed in your company’s overall IT portfolio. That’s why the B-52 is the perfect analogy for the data lake, with a “bionic” approach to regularly replacing major subsystems helping to keep your data lake viable for years to come.