New partnership announcement with Databricks

Artificial intelligence ceased a while ago to represent only and exclusively the future, playing a key role in the technological development of businesses already today. Bitrock is aware of this, and starting this year it has decided to launch its new Data, AI & ML Engineering area, precisely to apply next-generation technologies to one of the activities that most affect business growth: the proper management of data. A topic dear to the 100% Made in Italy consulting company, but also to the entire reference Group (Fortitude), which with its sister company Radicalbit has been dealing with streaming data analysis for several years now.

Collecting the information at hand, cataloging, and exploring it, training a model, running it and maintaining it, are all steps in an extremely complex cycle that, if completed correctly, yields countless benefits: from the ability to make timely decisions to the ability to minimize the waste of energy and raw materials, with related impact on business costs. With this in mind, and to give the new unit greater momentum, a partnership has been signed with Databricks, the company known for creating Apache Spark, MLflow and the data lakehouse with Delta Lake: a combination of data warehouse and data lake in a single, simple platform to better manage all types of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.

Antonio Barbuzzi has been appointed to Head the unit. The manager, who has a degree in telecommunications engineering and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, has always been involved, including abroad, in everything related to data analytics, both for large companies and emerging startups. After several years in France and the UK, he returned to Italy at the end of 2019, to Unicredit Services, as Head of GCC CBK Branch Tools and Head of ICT CRM and later as technical manager of the integration of the bank's new CRM. He joins Bitrock, precisely as Head of Data, AI & ML Engineering, in September last year.

"I am delighted to have joined such an innovative company as Bitrock. Helping the company in this new path will certainly be a difficult challenge but also a very compelling one. - declares Barbuzzi, Head of Data, AI & ML Engineering Area at Bitrock - Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning technologies, together with the Cloud, are crucial for our clients' business development, particularly when applied to data management and analysis. The goal will, therefore, be to provide them with tools and skills that can support them in the most congenial way, creating tailor-made services from time to time."

"Automation, simplification, and Artificial Intelligence are in our view the pillars of the future on which we base our work to ensure speed of development, cost reduction, and overall increase in efficiency for businesses. - Adds Leo Pillon, CEO of Bitrock - This is the vision of the entire Fortitude Group, as well as of Bitrock as it begins this new journey. The hope is that in a short time we can become an authoritative reference in a specific sector that is becoming more and more important day by day."

Scenario

According to recent estimates by Expert Market Research (2022), investment in data management-related activities amounts to about $70 billion, one-fifth of the total spending used for infrastructure creation in 2021 according to Gartner. A fast-growing trend that is also reflected in the job market, where data scientist, data engineer and machine learning engineer are among the most sought-after figures globally. A similar scenario is expected for the future. According to McKinsey, by 2025 companies will base all kinds of decisions on data analysis, relying on real-time processing for increasingly precise insights.

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Vision & Offering

This is the second part of our article which introduces Bitrock’s vision and offering in the Data, AI & ML Engineering area. The first part delimits the context where we focus and operate, while this one defines our vision and the proposition that follows.

Vision

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is shaping the future of mankind in nearly all industries, and it is driving advancements in heterogeneous fields such as big data, robotics, and Internet of Things. We have a strong conviction that AI will continue to be a driving force of innovation and progress in the future. As a company, we recognize the vital importance of AI and ML for organizations to not just survive but thrive in the market. 

That’s why we’re committed to providing our customers with the platform, tools, and expertise to harness the full potential of AI and help them create innovative solutions, helping them with operationalization of robust and reliable AI-based solutions, and we tailor our offering to meet the needs of customers in this field.

AI/ML is the last piece of the puzzle, the last stretch in a race. It needs strong pillars to build upon: a reliable and scalable data platform, designed to evolve and not just for latest delivery, where security and governance are central, with automatic tests, continuous integration/deployment in place. Indeed, for data even more so, the motto “garbage-in, garbage-out” is valid.

Data platforms should be tailored to the customer needs: there is no one-size-fit-all approach to data engineering problems, rather there are companies, customers, partners with different backgrounds and needs requiring different solutions. Paraphrasing Maslow's hammer, not everything is a nail and can be pounded using a hammer.

We believe in bespoke solutions for our clients, driving them through the intricacies of the current data landscape, and designing the platform better fitting their existing infrastructure and needs.

Our ambition is also to help our clients to define a clear and effective data strategy that aligns with the overall business objective. Organizations should define goals, processes and business targets; provide data governance framework and processes balancing security, privacy concerns and simplifying the process to discover, access and use data.

In order to provide the best services, we value our partnerships: as of today, we’re partners with Databricks, Confluent and HashiCorp.

Design Principles

Our solutions follow specific design principles, driving our choices and design:

Cloud first

Cloud first means prioritizing cloud over on-premise solutions. In other words, having to justify picking on-premise solutions rather than making a case for cloud ones.

We’re aware of the reluctance of some companies towards cloud solutions: nevertheless, nowadays there are still very few reasons to not embrace cloud. The advantages provided by the cloud are too many: faster time to market, easy scaling, no upfront license/hardware costs, lower operative cost. Basically, it allows us to outsource non-core processes and focus on what matters the most to the business.

ML/AI from the beginning

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have witnessed a tremendous leap forward in the latest years, mainly due to the increased availability of computing resources (faster GPUs, bigger memories) and data. Artificial intelligence has reached or surpassed human-level performances in many complex tasks: autonomous driving is now a reality and social networks use ML profusely to detect harmful content and target advertisements, while generative networks such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 or Google’s Imagen could be game changers in the quest toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).

AI/ML is no longer the future to look at, it’s the present. 

Some organizations will use it as a competitive advantage over its competitors; others will see it as a homework to keep up and remain competitive on the market. For sure, no one can really afford to ignore it anymore (or maybe just monopolies and the public administration?). 

AI and ML have a central role in our vision and shape our architectural and technological choices.

In this context, continuously interpreting data, discovering patterns and making timely decisions based on historical and real-time data, the so-called Continuous Intelligence, will play a crucial role in defining the business strategies and will be one of the most widespread applications of machine learning. Indeed, Gartner estimates that, within 3 years, more than 50% of all business initiatives will require continuous intelligence and, by 2023, more than one-third of enterprises will have analysts practising decision intelligence, including decision modelling.

MLOps and AI Engineering

MLOps, or Machine Learning Operations, is a field in the ML community that is rapidly gaining momentum. It advocates for the need to manage the ML lifecycle following software-inspired best practices and DevOps philosophy. This approach aims to make ML-powered software reproducible, testable, and evolvable, ensuring that models are deployed and updated in a controlled and efficient manner. The importance of MLOps lies in the ability to improve the speed and reliability of ML model deployment, while reducing the risk of errors and improving the overall performance of models.

Data democratization

We’ve already underlined the importance of data democratization. Achieving it requires several key elements to be in place. Firstly, it requires a data culture where data is seen as a strategic asset valued and leveraged throughout the company. This requires a buy-in and commitment from top management.

A widespread access to data urges for a widespread adoption of more robust Data Governance solutions, with data discoverability features, to effectively manage complex data processes and make data available and usable by everybody in need. 

Making data accessible means also lowering the entry-barrier to it, and therefore providing more user-friendly platforms, which can be usable in autonomy, without advanced knowledge (the so-called self-service platform).

Data Mesh is an approach oriented towards large-scale environments, going in this direction. It addresses silos and bottlenecks in large companies and emphasises the decentralization of data ownership, moving data ownership to the business domain teams.

Data mesh is an approach which increases overall complexity and introduces new challenges in organizations adopting it, but it may help them when scalability and data silos effectively represent an entry barrier to a company-wide data usage.

Reference Architecture

We at Bitrock refrain from providing a one-size-fit-all solution; we rather provide a reference data architecture modelled after technology stacks used across multiple companies, updated with more recent innovations.

We focus on a Multimodal data processing architecture, specialized in AI/ML and operational use-cases, able to support analytical needs typical of data warehouses. As previously explained, this is an alternative to a Business Intelligence oriented alternative, based on data warehouses.

At the core of the system there are the concepts of data lake and data lakehouse.

A data lake is a centralised repository that allows you to store and manage all your structured and unstructured data at any scale. They are traditionally oriented towards advanced data processing of operational data and ML/AI. The data lakehouse concept adds to them a robust storage layer paired with a processing engine (spark, presto, …) to enhance it with data-warehousing capabilities, making data lakes suitable for analytical workloads too. 

There is growing recognition for this architecture, which is supported by a wide range of vendors, including Databricks AWS, Google Cloud, Starburst, and Dremio - and by data warehouses vendors like Snowflake too.

For a more detailed introduction to it, please refer to a previous article on our Blog (Data Lakehouse, beyond the hype).

Our processing engine of choice is Apache Spark, which is the de-facto standard for operational workloads - paired with the battle-tested and reliable Apache Airflow or Astronom, a SaaS version. In the orchestration world, Dagster or Prefect are alternatives to Airflow which are gaining a lot of traction. They foster a switch to a higher-level abstraction, from managing workflow to handling dataflows.

Spark is suitable for both batch and real-time workloads, but for real-time data processing Apache Flink and Kafka Streams may be good alternatives, especially for applications with more stringent latency requirements.

In the streaming world applied to AI and ML, another option is Helicon from Radicalbit, which is a solution aimed at reducing the gap between data scientist and data engineering using a no-code/low-code approach. There’s a revived interest in the no-code/low-code solutions, which are ringing new users (i.e. analysts and software developers) into the ML market, pushed by new low code ML solutions like Databricks AutoML, H2O, Datarobot, etc.

Quick data exploration may be achieved by either the use of ad-hoc query engines like Trino/Presto/Starburst/Databricks SQL or using notebooks like Jupyter or their managed versions.

The integration is the boring homework preceding the fun part. However, it represents the largest fraction of cost of most data projects, ranging from 20-30% on average up to 70% for some pessimistic cases.

From a technical point of view, the injection layer is quite diversified and it is generally shaped following the organization's data sources and infrastructure.

Traditionally, data is extracted from operational data sources and transformed before being loaded into a data warehouse, the so called ETL. Cheap cloud storage and the separation of storage and computing laid the foundation for a paradigm shift advocating the anticipation of the loading phase before the transformation phase (ELT). This pattern, actually not totally new for data lakes, shines as it removes the business logic from loading phase in the injection layer, making it possible to simplify the integration by outsourcing it.

Fivetran, along with Airbyte, Matillion and many others, are examples of ELT tools. Strictly speaking, ETL term usually is generally used more in data-warehousing context, however those integration tools are beneficial to lakes and lakehouse architectures too: Fivetran has recently become a partner of Databricks too for example.

In the injection layer, Confluent is also playing a more and more important role with Kafka Connectors, allowing it to pull (and push too) data from a variety of sources. The pair Kafka and CDC (Change Data Capture), with software like Debezium/Qlik/Fivetran, is a more and more common integration pattern used in this context.

The following figure, based on the unified data platform from Horowitz (Bornstein, Li, and Casado 2020), exemplifies our architecture, in particular the boxes highlighted in yellow:

Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure

ML-platform

A central role in our platform is reserved to the operationalization of ML models and AI-based software.

MLOps, or Machine Learning Operations, is a rapidly growing field in the ML community that advocates for the need to manage the ML lifecycle following software-inspired best practices and DevOps philosophy. This approach aims to make ML-powered software reproducible, testable, and evolvable, ensuring that models are deployed and updated in a controlled and efficient manner. The importance of MLOps lies in the ability to improve the speed and reliability of ML model deployment, while reducing the risk of errors and improving the overall performance of models. Our idea of a generic platform for machine learning providing all the tools to operationalize ML lifecycle is best described by the following figure, based on (Bornstein, Li, and Casado 2020).

Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure

Conclusions

We believe AI and ML are crucial for any organization and will be fundamental to succeed and thrive in the market.

Bitrock is committed to providing customers with the platform, tools, and expertise to harness the full potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) and operationalize it through AI engineering and MLOps.

We tailor our offering to meet the unique needs of our customers and believe in providing bespoke solutions for our clients. Our ambition is to jointly define a clear and effective data strategy that aligns with their overall business objectives. 

If you have any questions, doubts or just want to discuss data-related topics, please feel free to get in touch: we’d be more than happy to help or just chat!

References

Author: Antonio Barbuzzi, Head of Data, AI & ML Engineering @Bitrock

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Vision & Offering

In this blog post we’re introducing Bitrock’s vision and offering in the Data, AI & ML Engineering area. We’ll provide an overview of the current data landscape, delimit the context where we focus and operate, and define our proposition.

This first part describes the technical and cultural landscape of the data and AI world, with an emphasis on the market and technology trends. The second part that defines our vision and technical offering is available here.

A Cambrian Explosion

The Data & AI landscape is rapidly evolving, with heavy investments in data infrastructure and an increasing recognition of the importance of data and AI in driving business growth.

Investment in managing data has been estimated to be worth over $70B [Expert Market Research 2022], accounting for over one-fifth of all enterprise infrastructure spent in 2021 according to (Gartner 2021).

This trend is tangible in the job market too: indeed, data scientists, data engineers, and machine learning engineers are listed in Linkedin’s fastest-growing roles globally (LinkedIn 2022).

And this trend doesn’t seem to slow down. According to (McKinsey 2022), by 2025 organizations will leverage on data for every decision, interaction, and process, shifting towards real-time processing to get faster and more powerful insights.

This growth is reflected also in the number of tools, applications, and companies in this area, and from what is generally called a “Cambrian explosion”, comparing this growth to the explosion of diverse life forms during the Cambrian period, when many new types of organisms appeared in a relatively short period of time. This is clearly depicted in the following figure, based on (Turk 2021).

A Cambrian Explosion

The Technological Scenario

Data architectures serve two main objectives, helping the business make better decisions exploiting and analyzing data - the so-called analytical plane - and provide intelligence to customer-facing applications - the so-called operational plane.

These two use-cases have led to two different architectures and ecosystems around them: analytical systems, based on data warehouses, and operational systems, based on data lakes.

The former, built upon data warehouses, have grown rapidly.  They’re focused on Business Intelligence, business users and business analysts, typically familiar with SQL. Cloud warehouses, like Snowflake, are driving this growth; the shift from on-prem towards cloud is at this point relentless.

Operational systems have grown too. These are based on data lakes; their growth is driven by the emerging lakehouse pattern and the huge interest in AI/ML. They are specialized in dealing with unstructured and structured data, supporting BI use cases too.

Since a few years ago, a path towards a convergence of both technologies has emerged. Data lake houses added ACID transactions and data-warehousing capabilities to data lakes, while warehouses have become capable of handling unstructured data and AI/ML workloads. Anyway, the two ecosystems are still quite different, and may or may not converge in the future.

In the ingestion and transformation sides, there’s a clear architectural shift from ETL to ELT (that is, data is firstly ingested and then transformed). This trend, made possible by the separation between storage and computing brought by the cloud, is pushed by the rise of CDC technologies and the promise to offload the non-business details to external vendors.

In this context Fivetran/DBT shine in the analytical world (along with new players like airbyte/matillion), while Databricks/Spark, Confluent/Kafka and Astronomer/Airflow are the de-facto standards in the operational world.

It is also noteworthy that there has been an increase in the use of stream processing for real-time data analysis. For instance, the usage of stream processing products from companies such as Databricks and Confluent has gained momentum.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) topics are gaining momentum too, and Gartner, in its annual report on strategic technological trends (Gartner 2021), lists Decision Intelligence, AI Engineering, Generative AI as priorities to accelerate growth and innovation.

Decision Intelligence involves the use of machine learning, natural language processing, and decision modelling to extract insights and inform decision-making. According to the report, in the next two years, a third of large organisations will be using it as a competitive advantage.

AI Engineering focuses on the operationalization of AI models to integrate them with the software development lifecycle and make them robust, reliable. According to Gartner analysts, it will generate three times more value than most enterprises not using it.
Generative AI is one of the most exciting and powerful examples of AI. It learns the context from training data and uses it to generate brand-new, completely original, realistic artefacts and will be used for a multitude of applications. It will account for 10% of all data produced by 2025 according to Gartner.

Data-driven Culture and Democratization

Despite the clear importance of data, it's a common experience that many data initiatives fail. Gartner has estimated that 85% of big data projects fail (O'Neill 2019) and that through 2022 only 20% of analytic insights will deliver business outcomes (White 2019).

What goes wrong? Rarely problems lie in the inadequacies of the technical solutions. Technical problems are probably the simplest. Indeed, since ten years ago, technologies have evolved tremendously fast and Big Data technologies have matured a lot. More often, problems are rather cultural.

It’s not a mystery that a data lake by itself does not provide any business value. Collecting, storing, and managing data is a cost. Data become (incredibly) valuable when they are used to produce knowledge, hints, actions. To make the magic happen, data should be accessible and available to everybody in the company. In other words, organizations should invest in a company-wide data-driven culture and aim at a true data democratization.

Data should be considered a strategic asset that is valued and leveraged throughout the organization. Managers, starting from the C-levels, should remove obstacles and create the conditions for people in need of data to access them, by removing obstacles, bottlenecks, and simplifying processes.

Creating a data culture and democratizing data allows organizations to fully leverage their data assets and make better use of data-driven insights. By empowering employees with data, organizations can improve decision-making, foster innovation, and drive business growth.

Last but not least, Big Data’s power does not erase the need for vision or human insight (Waller 2020). It is fundamental to have a data strategy in mind to define how the company needs to use data and the link to the business strategy. And, of course, a buy-in and commitment from all management levels, starting from the top. 

The second part of this article can be found here.

References

Author: Antonio Barbuzzi, Head of Data, AI & ML Engineering @ Bitrock

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Data Lakehouse Cover

Why the Lakehouse is here to stay

Introduction

The past few years witnessed a contraposition between two different ecosystems, the data warehouses and the data lakes - the former designed as the core for analytical and business intelligence, generally SQL centred, and the latter based on data lakes, providing the backbone for advanced processing and AI/ML, operating on a wide variety of languages ranging from Scala to Python, R and SQL.

Despite the contraposition between respective market leaders, thinking for example to Snowflake vs Databricks, the emerging pattern shows also a convergence between these two core architectural patterns [Bor20].

The lakehouse is the new concept that moves data lakes closer to data warehouses, making them able to compete in the BI and analytical world.

Of course, as with any emerging technical innovations, it is hard to separate the marketing hype from the actual technological value, which, ultimately, only time and adoption can prove. While it is undeniable that marketing is playing an important role in spreading the concept, there’s a lot more in this concept than just buzzwords.

Indeed, the Lakehouse architecture has been introduced separately and basically in parallel by three important and trustworthy companies, and with three different implementations. 

Databricks published its seminal paper on data lake [Zah21], followed by open sourcing Delta Lake framework [Delta, Arm20]

In parallel Netflix, in collaboration with Apple, introduced Iceberg [Iceberg], while Uber introduced Hudi [Hudi] (pronounced “Hoodie”), both becoming top tier Apache projects in May 2020.

Moreover, all major data companies are competing to support it, from AWS to Google Cloud, passing through Dremio, Snowflake and Cloudera, and the list is growing.

In this article, I will try to explain, in plain language, what a lakehouse is, why it is generating so much hype, and why it is rapidly becoming a centerpiece of modern data platform architectures.

What is a Lakehouse?

In a single sentence, a lakehouse is a “data lake” on steroids, unifying the concept of “data lake” and “data warehouse”.

In practice, the lakehouse leverages a new metadata layer providing a “table abstraction” and some features typical of data warehouses on top of a classical Data Lake.

This new layer is built on top of existing technologies in particular on a binary, often columnar, file format, which can be either Parquet, ORC or Avro, and on a storage layer.

Therefore, the main building blocks of a lakehouse platform (see figure 1.x), from a bottom-up perspective, are:

  • A File Storage layer, generally cloud based, for example AWS S3 or GCP Cloud Storage or Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2.
  • A binary file format like Parquet or ORC used to store data and metadata
  • The new table file format layer, Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg or Apache Hudi
  • A processing engine supporting the above table format, for example Spark or Presto or Athena, and so on.

To better understand the idea behind the lakehouse and the evolution towards it, let’s start with the background.

First generation, the data warehouse

Data Warehouses have been around for 40+ years now. 

They were invented to answer some business questions which were too computational intensive for the operational databases and to be able to join datasets coming from multiple sources.

The idea was to extract data from the operational systems, transform them in the more suitable format to answer those questions and, finally, load them into a single specialised database. Incidentally, this process is called ETL (Extract, Transform, Load).

This is sometimes also referred to as the first generation.

To complete the concept, a data mart is a portion of a data warehouse focused on a specific line of business or department.

The second generation, data lakes

The growing volume of data to handle, along with the need to deal with unstructured data (i.e. images, videos, text documents, logs, etc) made data warehouses more and more expensive and inefficient.

To overcome these problems, the second generation data analytics platforms started offloading all the raw data into data lakes, low-cost storage systems providing a file-like API. 

Data lakes started with Mapreduce and Hadoop (even if the name data lake came later) and were successively followed up by cloud data lakes, such as the one based on S3, ADLS and GCS.

Lakes feature low cost storage, higher speed, and greater scalability, but, on the other hand, they gave up many of the advantages of warehouses.

Data Lakes and Warehouses

Lakes did not replace warehouses: they were complementary, each of them addressed different needs and use cases. Indeed, raw data was initially imported into data lakes, manipulated, transformed and possibly aggregated. Then, a small subset of it would later be ETLed to a downstream data warehouse for decision intelligence and BI applications.

This two-tier data lake + warehouse architecture is now largely used in the industry, as you can see in the figure below:

Source: Martin Fowler

Problems with two-tiered Data Architectures

A two-tier architecture comes with additional complexity and in particular it suffers from the following problems:

  • Reliability and redundancy, as more copies of the same data exist in different systems and they need to be kept available and consistent across each other;
  • Staleness, as the data needs to be loaded first in the data lakes and, only later, into the data warehouse, introducing additional delays from the initial load to when the data is available for BI;
  • Limited support for AI/ML on top of BI data: business requires more and more predictive BI analysis, for example, “which customers should we offer discounts”. AI/ML libraries do not run on top of warehouses, so vendors often suggest offloading data back to the lakes, adding additional steps and complexity to the pipelines.
    Modern data warehouses are adding some support for AI/ML, but they’re still not ideal to cope with binary formats (video, audio, etc).
  • Cost: of course, keeping up two different systems increases the total cost of ownership, which includes administration, licences cost, additional expertise cost.

The third generation, the Data Lakehouse

A data lakehouse is an architectural paradigm adding a table layer backed up by file-metadata to a data lake, in order to provide traditional analytical DB features such as ACID transactions, data versioning, auditing, indexing, caching and query optimization.

In practice, it may be considered as a data lake on steroids, a combination of both data lakes and data warehouses.

This pattern allows to move many of the use cases traditionally handled by data warehouses into data lakes, it simplifies the implementation by moving from a two-tier pipeline to a single tier one.

In the following figure you can see a summary of the three different architectures.

Source: Databricks

Additionally, lakehouses move the implementation and support of data warehouses features from the processing engine to the underlying file format. As such, more and more processing engines are able to capitalise on the new features. Indeed most engines are coming up with a support for lake houses format (Presto, Starburst, Athena, …), contributing to the hype. The benefits for the users is that the existence of multiple engines featuring data warehouses capabilities allows them to pick the best solution suitable for each use case. For example, exploiting spark for more generic data processing and AI/ML problems, or Trino/Starburst/Athena/Photon/etc for quick SQL queries.

Characteristics of Data Lakehouse

For those who may be interested, let’s dig (slightly) more into the features provided by lake houses and on their role.

ACID

The most important feature, available across all the different lakehouse implementations, is the support of ACID transactions.

ACID, standing for atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability, is a set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps.

Indeed, cloud object stores haven't always provided strong consistency, so stale reads were possible - this is called eventual consistency.

Anyway, there’s no mutual exclusion guarantees, so that multiple writers can update the same file without external coordination and there’s no atomic update support across multiple keys, so that updates to multiple files may be seen at different times.

Lakehouse implementations guarantee ACID transactions on a single table, despite the underlying used storage and regardless of the number of files used underlying.

This is achieved in different ways in the three major players, but generally speaking, they all use metadata files to identify which files are part of a table snapshot and some WAL-like file to track all the changes applied to a table.

Note that there are alternative ways to provide ACID consistency, in particular by using an external ACID consistent metadata storage, like an external DB. This is what HIVE 3 ACID does for example, or Snowflake. However, not having to depend on an external system removes a bottleneck, a single point of failure, and allows multiple processing engines to leverage on the data structure.

Partitioning

Automatic partitioning is another fundamental feature, used to reduce queries’ process requirements and simplify table maintenance. This feature is implemented by partitioning data into multiple folders and while it can be easily implemented at application level, this is easily provided transparently by the lakehouse. Moreover some lakeshouses (see Iceberg) can support partitioning evolution automatically.

Time Travel

Time Travel is the ability to query/restore a table to a previous state in time.

This is achieved by keeping metadata containing snapshot information for longer time periods.

Time travel is a feature provided by traditional DBs oriented to OLAP workloads too, as this feature may be implemented relying on write-ahead-logs. Indeed it was available also in Postgres DB for example, until version 6.2, SQL Server. The separation between storage and processing makes this feature easier to support in lake houses, relying them on cheap underlying storage.

Of course, to reduce cost/space usage, you may want to periodically clean up past metadata, so that time travel is possible up to the oldest available snapshot.

Schema Evolution and Enforcement

Under the hood, Iceberg, Delta and Hudi rely on binary file formats (Parquet/ORC/Avro), which are compatible with most of the data processing frameworks.

Lakehouse provides an additional abstraction layer allowing in-place schema evolution, a mapping between the underlying files’ schemas and the table schema, so that schema evolution can be done in-place, without rewriting the entire dataset.

Streaming support

Data Lakes are not well suited for streaming applications for multiple reasons, to name a few cloud storages do not allow to append data to files for example, they haven’t provided for a while a consistent view on written files, etc. Yet this is a common need and, for example, offloading kafka data into a storage layer is a fundamental part of the lambda architecture.

The main obstacles are that object stores do not offer an “append” feature or a consistent view across multiple files.

Lake Houses make it possible to use delta tables as both input and output. This is achieved by an abstraction layer masking the use of multiple files and a background compassion process joining small files into larger ones, in addition to “Exactly-Once Streaming Writes” and “efficient log tailing”. For details please see [Arm20].

The great convergence

Will lake house-based platforms completely get rid of data warehouses? I believe this is unlikely. What’s sure at the moment is that the boundaries between the two technologies are becoming more and more blurred.

Indeed, while data lakes, thanks to Deta Lake, Apache Iceberg and Apache Hudi are moving into data warehouses territory, the opposite is true as well.

Indeed, Snowflake has added support for the lakehouse table layer (Apache Iceberg/Delta at the time of writing), becoming one of the possible processing engines supporting the lakehouse table layer.

At the same time, warehouses are moving into AI/ML applications, traditionally a monopoly of data-lakes: Snowflake released Snowpark, a AI/ML python library, allowing to write data pipelines and ML workflow directly in Snowflake. Of course it will take a bit of time for the data science community to accept and master yet another library, but the directions are marked.

But what’s interesting is that warehouses and lakes are becoming more and more similar: they both rely on commodity storage, offer native horizontal scaling, support semi-structured data types, ACID transactions, interactive SQL queries, and so on.

Will they converge to the point where they’ll become interchangeable in the data stacks? This is hard to tell and experts have different opinions: while the direction is undeniable, differences in languages, use cases or even marketing will play an important role in defining how future data stacks will look like. Anyway, it is a safe bet to say that the lakehouse is here to stay.

References

Author: Antonio Barbuzzi, Head of Data, AI & ML Engineering @ Bitrock

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Apache Airflow

Introduction

Apache Airflow is one of the most used workflow management tools for data pipelines - both AWS and GCP have a managed Airflow solution in addition to other SaaS offerings (notably Astronomer).

It allows developers to programmatically define and schedule data workflows and monitor them using Python. It is based on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) concept, where all the different steps (tasks) of the data processing (wait for a file, transform it, ingest it, join with other datasets, process it, etc.) are represented as graph’s nodes.

Each node can be either an “operator”, that is a task doing some actual job (i.e. transform data, load it, etc.), or “sensors”, a task waiting for some event to happen (i.e. a file arrival, a Rest api call, etc.).

In this article we will discuss sensors and tasks controlling external systems and, in particular, the internals of some of the (relatively) new most interesting features, Reschedule sensors, SmartSensors and Deferrable Operators.

Sensors are synchronous by default

Sensors are a special type of Operators designed to wait for an event to occur and then succeed so that their downstream tasks can run.

Sensors are a fundamental building block to create pipelines in Airflow; however, historically, as they share the Operator’s main execution method, they were (and by default still are) synchronous. 

By default, they busy-wait for an event to occur consuming a worker’s slot.

Too many “sensors” busy waiting may, if not well dimensioned, use all the worker’s slots and bring to starvation and deadlocks (if TaskExternalSensor were used for example). Even when enough slots are available, workers may be hogged by tons of sleeping processes.

Working around it

The first countermeasure is to confine sensors in separate pools. This only partially limits the problems.

A more efficient workaround exploits the airflow’s ability to retry failed tasks. Basically, the idea is to make unmet sensor fail if sensing conditions are unmet, and set the sensor’s number of retries and retry delay to account for it, in particular number_of_retries * retry_delay should be equal to the sensor’s timeout. This frees the worker’s slot, making it possible to run other tasks.

This solution works like a charm, it doesn’t require any Airflow code change.

Main drawbacks are:

  • bugs and errors in the sensors may be masked by timeouts, which however may be mitigated by properly written unit tests.
  • Some overhead is added to the scheduler, as such polling intervals may not be too frequent - and a separate process is spawned.

Reschedule mode

Sensor’s reschedule mode is quite similar to the previous workaround.

In practice, sensors have a new “mode” attribute which may have two values, “poke”, the default one, providing the old synchronous behaviour, and “reschedule”.

When mode is set to reschedule:

  • BaseSensorOperator’s “execute” method raises an AirflowRescheduleException when the sensing condition is unmet, containing the reschedule_date
  • This exception is caught by the TaskInstance run method, which persists it in the TaskReschedule table along with id of the task associated with it and updates the task state to “UP_FOR_RESCHEDULE
  • When the TaskInstance run method is called, if it is in “UP_FOR_RESCHEDULE” state, the task is run if the reschedule_date allows it

This approach improves over the above mentioned workaround as it allows to distinguish between actual errors and unmet sensor condition, otherwise shares the same limitations, and lightweight checks are quite resource intensive.

Smart sensors

In parallel to the “reschedule” mode, a “different” approach was proposed in AIP-17, called Smart Sensor, merged in release 2.0.0 and already deprecated and planned to be removed in the next Airflow 2.4.0 release (they’re not in the main branch anymore).

All smart sensor poke-contexts are serialised in the DB and picked up by a separate process, running in special built-in smart sensor DAGs.

I won’t add any additional details on them, as they’ve been replaced by Deferrable Operators.

Smart Sensor were a sensible solution; however, despite considerable changes in airflow code, they have two main pitfails:

  • No High Availability support
  • Sensor’s suspension is a subset of a more generic problem, suspension of tasks - this solution can’t be easily extended to it.

For referece, please refer to AIP-17 here and here.

Deferrable Operators

Deferrable Operators, introduced in AIP-40, are instead a more generic solution: they’re a superset of Smart Sensors, supporting broader Task suspension, and built from the design to be highly-available. Therefore, no surprise they’ve replaced SmartSensors.

Albeit quite elegant, this solution is slightly more complex. To fully understand it, let’s start from a  use case to grasp the solution details.

A typical airflow use-case is to orchestrate jobs running on external systems (for example, a Spark Job runs on Yarn/EMR/…). More and more frequently, those systems offer an asynchronous API returning a job id and a way to poll its status.

Without Deferrable Operators, a common way to implement it is through a custom operator triggering the job in the execute method, getting the job id, and polling for it until it finishes, in a busy-wait loop. One may be tempted to use two separate operators, one for the “trigger” and one for the “poll” calls, anyway this would invalidate the airflow retry mechanism.

Deferrable Operators solve this problem and add to the tasks the ability to suspend themselves. If the polling condition is unmet, task execution may be suspended and resumed after a configurable delay.
Suspension of tasks is achieved by raising a TaskDeferred exception in a deferrable operator. A handy “defer” method is added to the BaseOperator to do it. This exception contains the following information:

  • The function to resume, along with the needed arguments.
  • A Trigger object, containing the details on when to trigger the next run.

The function arguments are a simple way to keep the task state, for example the job_id of the triggered spark job to poll.

Most useful trigger objects are generally time-based, and most commons are already provided by airflow: DateTimeTrigger, triggering at a specific time, and TimeDeltaTrigger, triggering after a delay, so it is generally not necessary to implement them.

Triggers and Triggerer implementation leverages Python’s async library introduced with Python 3.5 (Airflow 2.0.0 requires Python version 3.6 or higher). A trigger extends a BaseTrigger and provides an async-compatible “run” method, which yields control when idle. 

Time based trigger are implemented in a while loop using await asyncio.sleep rather than thread.sleep.

This allows them to coexist with thousands of other Triggers within one process.

Note that, to limit the number of triggers, there is a one-to-many relationship between Triggers and TaskInstances, in particular the same trigger may be shared by multiple tasks.

Let’s see how everything is orchestrated.

When a TaskDeferred exceptions is caught in the run method of TaskInstance, these steps are followed:

  • TaskInstance state is updated to DEFERRED.
  • The method and the arguments to resume the execution of the task are serialised in the TaskInstance (and not in the Trigger), in the next_method and next_kwargs columns table. Task instance is linked to the trigger through a trigger_id attributed to TaskInstance.
  • The Trigger is persisted in the DB, in a separate table, Trigger.

A separate airflow component, the Triggerer,  forming a new continuously-running-process part of an Airflow installation, is in charge of executing the triggers.

This process contains an async event loop which drains all the triggers serialised in the DB and creates all the not-yet-created triggers, running the coroutines concurrently. Thousands of triggers may run at once efficiently.

A trigger does some lightweight check. For example, the DateTimeTrigger verifies that the triggering date is passed; if so, it yields a “TriggerEvent”. 

All events are handled by the Triggerer, and for each TriggerEvent all the corresponding TaskInstance to schedule are picked up, their state is updated from DEFERRED to SCHEDULED.
The TaskInstance run method has been updated to check if the task should resume (it checks if “next_method” is set); if so, it resumes it, otherwise it proceeds as usual.

The availability of the system is increased by allowing multiple Triggerer to run in parallel - this is implemented adding to each Trigger the id of the triggerer in charge of it - and adding a heartbeat to each triggerer, serialised in the DB. Each trigger will pick up only assigned triggers. 

Author: Antonio Barbuzzi, Head of Data Engineering @ Bitrock

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mainframes

Today, mainframes are still widely used in data-centric industries such as Banking, Finance and Insurances. 92 of the world’s top 100 banks rely on these legacy technologies, and it is believed that they account for 90% of all global credit card transactions (source: Skillsoft).

This is suboptimal, since relying on mainframes generates high operational costs, calculated in MIPS (million instructions per second). A large institution can spend more than $16 million per year, estimating the cost for a 15.200 MIPS mainframe (source: Amazon Web Services).

In addition, mainframes come with technical complexities, like the reliance on the 60-year old COBOL programming language. For organizations, this means not only reduced data accessibility and infrastructure scalability, but also the problem of finding skilled COBOL programmers at a reasonable cost - more info here

Moreover, as consumers are now used to sophisticated on-demand digital services  - we could call it the “Netflix effect”, by which everything must be available immediately and everywhere. Thus banking services, such as trading, home banking, and financial reports need to keep the pace and offer reliability and high performances. In order to do that, large volumes of data must be quickly accessed and processed from web and mobile applications: mainframes may not be the answer. 

Mainframe Offloading to the rescue

Mainframe Offloading can solve the conundrum. It entails replicating the mainframe data to a parallel database, possibly open source, that can be accessed in a more agile way saving expensive MIPS. As a sort of “Digital Twin” to the mainframe, the replicated data store can be used for data analysis, applications, cloud services and more. 

This form of database replication provides significant advantages both in flexibility and cost reduction. Whenever an application or a service needs to read customers’ data, it can access the parallel database without having to pay for expensive mainframe MIPS. Moreover, the mere offloading paves the way for a progressive migration to the cloud, e.g. entailing bidirectional replication of information between the open source cloud database and the datacenter.

Offloading data from the mainframe requires middleware tools for migration and integration. Apache Kafka can be leveraged as a reliable solution for event streaming and data storage, thanks to its distributed and replicated log capabilities. It can integrate different data sources into a scalable architecture with loosely coupled components. 

Alongside the event streaming platform, CDC (Change Data Capture) tools are also to be considered to push data modifications from the mainframe into the streaming platform. CDC is a software process that automatically identifies and tracks updates in a database. It allows to overcome the limitations of batch data processing in favour of a near-real time transfer. While IBM and Oracle offer proprietary CDC tools, such as InfoSphere Data Replication and Oracle Golden Gate,  3rd party and open-source solutions are also available, like Qlik Data Integration (formerly known as Attunity) and Debezium

From Offloading to Replacement

As a heuristic process for perfectibility, Mainframe Offloading can also be seen as a starting point to mainframe replacement proper, with both applications and mission-critical core banking systems running in the cloud. This would mean that the expensive monolithic architecture gives way to modernization and future-proof, cloud native solutions.

Yet, replacing a mainframe is not an easy nor a quick task. In his blog article “Mainframe Integration, Offloading and Replacement with Apache Kafka”, Kai Waehner hypothesizes a gradual 5-year plan. First, Kafka is used for decoupling between the mainframe and the already-existing applications. Then, new cloud-based applications and microservices are built and integrated in the infrastructure. Finally, some or even all mainframe applications and mission-critical functionalities are replaced with modern technology.

It must be said that it is often not possible to switch off mainframes altogether. For larger institutions, such as major banks, the costs and inconveniences of a full migration may be just too high. Realistically speaking, the most effective scenario would be a hybrid infrastructure in which certain core banking functionalities remain tied to the mainframe, and others are migrated to a multi-cloud infrastructure.

How Bitrock can help

Given the complexity of the operation, it is fundamental to work with a specialized partner with thorough expertise with offloading and legacy migration. In Bitrock we have worked along with major organizations to help them modernize the infrastructure, save costs and support their cloud native transition. By way of example, we have carried out a mainframe offloading project for an important consumer credit company, transferring data from a legacy DB2 to a newer Elastic database. Thanks to the Confluent platform and a CDC system, data are now intercepted and pushed in real time from the core system to the front-end database, enabling advanced use cases

If you want to know more about this success story or how we can help you with your journey from legacy to cloud, please do not hesitate to contact us!

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These last couple of years have taught an important lesson to all Data & Analytics specialists: agility is the key. Being able to pivot between different design patterns and approaches is increasingly important to thrive through supply chain volatility, accelerated digitalization, and disruption of business operations.

 To turn these challenges into opportunities, and stay ahead of competition, companies must revise antiquate models based on centralized, static data. The centrifugal shift towards distributed architectures and multi-cloud infrastructures, emerged a few years ago, has today found its cultural equivalent in new, decentralized approaches to Data & Analytics. At the same time, the possibility to analyze data in motion in a dynamic manner allows to integrate actionable insights into decision making and business operations.

 Let’s take a look at some of the most interesting Data & Analytics trends that have emerged or consolidated recently, and how these can create value for organizations in the next future.

Small & Wide Data

We have come to realize that Big Data is not always the answer. Accumulating information can lead to data sourcing and quality issues, plus requiring the implementation of deep learning analytical techniques whose cost and complexity may outweigh the results. We have also seen how quickly data can become irrelevant – companies run the risk of hoarding stale, useless information that cannot provide significant value.

Small & Wide Data have emerged as innovative approaches to enable the generation of valuable insights via less voluminous, more varied data. The former approach eschews data-hungry models in favor of tailored analytical techniques relying on limited amounts of data. The latter leverages the integration of heterogeneous sources, both structured and unstructured, instead of a larger single one.

 Small & Wide Data can enable the access to advanced analytics and AI for smaller players, which cannot rely on enough information for conventional Big Data techniques. But bigger companies can also benefit from these approaches. As Gartner suggests, 70% of organizations will shift their focus from big to Small and Wide data by 2025.

Data Mesh

The current shifts towards decentralization and microservices can be said to underpin the very notion of Data Mesh. First introduced by Zhamak Dehghani in her 2019 article “How to Move Beyond a Monolithic Data Lake to a Distributed Data Mesh”, it purports to overcome the limitations of gargantuan Data Lakes and their reliance on hyper-specialized teams and financially-untenable ETL pipelines.

 By contrast, Data Mesh can be seen as an organizational and architectural model that allows for a distributed, domain-driven data ownership. This ubiquitous data platform empowers cross-functional teams to operate independently, while offering greater flexibility and interaction between distributed datasets.

It is worth noting that the distributed Data Mesh architecture stems from a paradigm shift, rather than a Copernican revolution. It does not ditch altogether data lake advantages and principles – centralization is in fact retained for governance and open standards – but evolves them to increase business agility and reduce time-to-market.

Image by Zhamak Dehghani via martinfowler.com

Continuous Intelligence

Continuous Intelligence leverages Event Stream Processing and Real-time Analytics to integrate actionable insights into decision-making and business processes. This design pattern turns analytics into a prescriptive practice: ingest large volumes of data in motion – from sources like IoT, eCommerce transactions, traffic, weather – and leverage them to augment or even automate human decisions.

CI enables companies to analyze data on the fly, identify trends and root causes, and make real-time decisions that allow strategic differentiation in competitive, saturated markets. It is a transformative model that provides a plethora of opportunities – from detecting fraud in finance and improving customer experience in retail to implementing predictive maintenance in manufacturing and more. CI can be also employed to connect different branches and departments in a company, to share & leverage data in real time, optimize decision-making and thus increase productivity.

Thanks to its partnership with Radicalbit, Bitrock can integrate its D&A consulting services with Helicon, a cutting-edge Continuous Intelligence platform. This code-free SaaS solution enhances the management of data streaming pipelines with Machine Learning, dramatically accelerating the development of real time advanced analytics (descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive). The platform offers efficient features such as a stream processing pipelines visual editor, with debugging capabilities, data exploration, and real-time ML monitoring, enabling the adoption of the Continuous Intelligence paradigm.

Analytics at the Edge

Speaking of IoT, a recent D&A trend concerns the decentralization of the very location in which the collection and analysis of data takes place. Edge Analytics means distributing information, analytics and technology closer to – or possibly within – the physical assets, i.e. the edge. In other words, it entails the possibility of avoiding in part or altogether the transfer to data centers and cloud environments, increasing the flexibility of the whole data infrastructure.  

It is a growing trend – Gartner foresees that, by 2023, more than 50% “primary responsibility of data and analytics leaders will comprise data created, managed and analyzed in edge environments”. The reasons are multiple: for instance, provisioning analytics to the edge can have a positive impact on the speed in which data is processed, with actionable insights being generated in real-time. Stability is another case in point: avoiding data transfer means less disruption from connectivity issues. Finally, we have to consider compliance – leaving data “where it is” reduces the headaches deriving from different national regulations and governance policies.

For these reasons, Analytics at the Edge can bring significant benefits to a wide array of applications. Automotive risk mitigation is, for instance, a business case in which analyzing data in real time is fundamental to avoid collisions or breakdowns. Healthcare, on the other hand, can simplify the management of personal, sensitive data if this is not moved to cloud services or data centers located under different jurisdictions.

Data Democracies

The notion of Data Democracy concerns the creation of an ethical and methodological framework that removes the technological barriers to informed data management. It revolves around the principle that people, regardless of their technical know-how, should be able to access and trust available information during their daily operations.

The democratization of data impacts any kind of business organization, and bears upon both personnel and technology. Lowering the barrier to data means first of all offering upskilling programs aimed at data literacy development, whatever the function or seniority within the company. It also means rethinking data silos in favor of more flexible and transparent architectural models, such as Data Meshes (see above). Finally, it entails implementing efficient analytics and Business Intelligence tools on a company-wide level. One example is Sense, by our partner Qlik, that enables advanced, ML-powered analytics while helping develop data literacy.

As a real cultural shift, a Data Democracy can offer significant benefits to a company’s internal operations. It empowers non-technical employees to make fast, informed decisions without the support of IT or data experts – think of how this can help Product, Marketing, Sales team generate more value and save resources. Moreover, developing a corporate data culture may have a positive impact on an organization’s relationship with its stakeholder and the public at large. Data ethics informs data governance policies that promote privacy, cybersecurity, and a righteous management of customer data.


These are only some of the opportunities offered by the latest trends in Data & Analytics. If you want to know how Bitrock can help your company evolve its data strategy, and stay ahead of competition with cutting-edge solutions, send us a message – we’ll be happy to book a call!

Author: Daniele Croci, Digital Marketing Specialist @ Bitrock

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PNRR Bitrock

Non c’è alternativa”, recitava un vecchio slogan politico che portò alla creazione del governo più duraturo del Novecento. Oggi, il medesimo mantra si può applicare alle molteplici necessità di innovazione e digitalizzazione del tessuto produttivo italiano, che si (ri)affaccia sul mercato globale al termine, si spera, della crisi pandemica già affardellato da decennali cali di produttività e competitività. Per chi vuole prosperare nuovo scenario, il cambiamento tecnologico rappresenta un principio cogente.

In questo senso, il Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR) costituisce una opportunità rilevante. Elaborato in risposta alla grave crisi economica e sociale innescata dal Covid19, prevede l’allocazione di 191,5 miliardi di euro in una serie di interventi atti a rilanciare la fragile economia italiana e stimolare l’occupazione. Gli ambiti spaziano dallo sviluppo della mobilità sostenibile, alla transizione ecologica e all’inclusione di gruppi sociali ulteriormente marginalizzati dalla precarietà lavorativa.

Transizione digitale 4.0 per il sistema Italia

La prima missione del PNRR mette al centro “Digitalizzazione, Innovazione, Competitività, Cultura e Turismo”, valorizzando i concetti chiave che fungono da leitmotiv per l’intero Recovery Plan. Prevede lo stanziamento di 40,32 miliardi di euro per un programma di transizione digitale che interessa sia il settore pubblico sia quello privato. 

L’obiettivo è quello di sostenere lo sviluppo e la capacità competitiva di un sistema paese che, al momento, si posizione al 25mo posto (su 28) nel Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI). Come ricorda il PNRR (pag. 83), tale arretratezza fa il paio con il calo di produttività che ha caratterizzato l’economia italiana nell’ultimo ventennio, a fronte di una tendenza positiva nel resto del continente europeo. Questa contrazione è sovente legata alla ridotta innovazione digitale delle piccole e medie imprese, che rappresentano il 92% delle aziende e impiegano l’82% dei lavoratori in Italia (Il Sole 24 Ore).

La missione si articola in tre componenti:

  1. Digitalizzazione, Innovazione e Sicurezza nella PA (9,75 Mrd)
  2. Digitalizzazione, Innovazione e Competitività del Sistema Produttivo (23,89 Mrd)
  3. Turismo e Cultura (6,68 Mrd)

Vediamo nel dettaglio il secondo punto, cui è dedicato uno dei maggiori investimenti del PNRR.

Digitalizzazione, Innovazione e Competitività del Sistema Produttivo: come funziona

Il programma per il settore privato si prefigge, nelle parole del documento, di rafforzare “la politica di incentivazione fiscale già in corso (studiata per colmare il gap di “digital intensity” del nostro sistema produttivo verso il resto d’Europa – minori investimenti valutabili in due punti di Pil – specie nella manifattura e nelle PMI), che ha avuto effetti positivi sia sulla digitalizzazione delle imprese che sull’occupazione, soprattutto giovanile e nelle nuove professioni” (pag. 98).

Prevede una serie di investimenti e riforme che hanno l’obbiettivo di potenziare la digitalizzazione, innovazione tecnologica e internazionalizzazione del tessuto produttivo e imprenditoriale, con un occhio specifico alle PMI che maggiormente risentono del clima di volatilità contemporanea. 

All'interno del PNRR, il piano di investimento “Transizione 4.0” costituisce un’evoluzione del già noto programma Industria 4.0 del 2017, di cui viene allargato il novero delle aziende potenzialmente beneficiarie. Prevede tra le altre cose l’erogazione di un credito di imposta per società che decidono di investire in

  1. Beni capitali, materiali e immateriali
  2. Ricerca, sviluppo e innovazione
  3. Attività di formazione alla digitalizzazione e di sviluppo delle relative competenze

La prima voce riguarda l’investimento per strumenti “direttamente connessi alla trasformazione digitale dei processi produttivi” – i cosiddetti Beni 4.0 già indicati negli allegati A e B alla legge 232 del 2016 –, e “beni immateriali di natura diversa, ma strumentali all’attività dell’impresa (pag. 99)

Se il primo allegato dettaglia una serie di componenti hardware, tra cui macchinari, utensili e sistemi di monitoraggio, il secondo si concentra su soluzioni software ad alto tasso tecnologico che possono sostenere le aziende in un percorso di crescita scalabile e sostenibile.

Le applicazioni possibili

Integrati all’interno di una visione strategica, le soluzioni hardware e software menzionate nel PNRR possono trovare applicazione in una serie di ambiti, tra cui:

  • La transizione verso il paradigma Cloud Native, un approccio che sfrutta le tecnologie del Cloud Computing per progettare e implementare applicazioni sulla base dei principi di flessibilità, adattabilità, efficienza e resilienza. Grazie a strumenti metodologici e tecnologici come DevOps, container e microservizi, il Cloud Native permette di ridurre il time to market e sostenere l’evoluzione agile dell’intero ecosistema aziendale.
  • La valorizzazione del patrimonio informativo aziendale attraverso l’implementazione di sistemi di Data Analysis in tempo reale, IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) e Data Streaming che, combinati con Machine Learning e Intelligenza Artificiale, possono essere sfruttati per la manutenzione predittiva, con un evidente ottimizzazione dei costi. Rientrano in questo ambito anche i Digital Twin, le copie virtuali di risorse o processi industriali che permettono di sperimentare in vitro nuove soluzioni e prevenire malfunzionamenti.
  • La cybersecurity, sempre più centrale in un contesto di crescente digitalizzazione di processi e servizi, e di crescente interdipendenza di attori nazionali e stranieri, pubblici e privati all’interno della catena del valore digitale.

Questi percorsi di maturazione digitale possono essere rilevanti sia per le grandi realtà, sia per le PMI che faticano maggiormente a tenere il passo con l’evoluzione tecnologica e la competizione internazionale. Lo sforzo è premiato: come riporta l’Osservatorio innovazione digitale PMI del Politecnico di Milano, le aziende medie e piccole digitalizzate riportano in media un incremento del 28% nell’utile netto, con il margine di profitto più alto del 18% (La Repubblica).

Perché quindi le aziende non digitalizzano? Il problema, spesso, è nella mancanza di personale qualificato. La carenza di staff qualificato affligge il 42% delle PMI italiane (La Repubblica), e la cifra sale al 70% se prendiamo in esame l’intero tessuto produttivo europeo (Commissione Europea). Un altro possibile fattore bloccante concerne la renitenza all’abbandono o evoluzione di sistemi legacy già consolidati all’interno dei processi aziendali.

Questi sono solo alcuni dei motivi per cui è fondamentale affiancarsi a un partner qualificato, che possa accompagnare l’azienda nella pianificazione degli investimenti tecnologici e digitali resi possibili dal PNRR (e non solo).

Bitrock ha competenze certificate ed esperienza internazionale per offrire soluzioni su misura che innovano l’ecosistema tecnologico e digitale, mantenendo gli investimenti legacy del cliente. Il know-how specializzato in ambito DevOps, Software Engineering, UX&Front-End e Data&Analytics è la chiave per affrontare il percorso di evoluzione digitale, con al centro i valori di semplificazione e automazione che generano valore duraturo.

Per conoscere nel dettaglio come possiamo supportare la tua azienda, contattaci subito!

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