Databricks vs Snowflake: choosing the right platform for your needs
In the world of big data and analytics, two platforms have emerged as leaders: Databricks and Snowflake. Both offer powerful solutions for managing and analyzing large datasets, but they have different strengths and weaknesses.

In this blog post, we will compare Databricks and Snowflake to help you choose the right platform for your needs.

Overview:
Databricks: Databricks is a unified analytics platform that provides tools for data engineering, data science, and machine learning. It is built on top of Apache Spark, a popular open-source framework for big data processing. Databricks offers a collaborative workspace where data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts can work together to analyze data and build machine learning models.

Snowflake: Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing platform that is designed for large-scale data storage and analytics.

It separates storage and compute, allowing you to scale each independently based on your needs. Snowflake is known for its ease of use and performance, particularly for complex queries and large datasets.

Performance
Databricks: Databricks is optimized for Apache Spark, which is known for its speed and scalability.

It can handle large datasets and complex analytics workflows, making it suitable for organizations with demanding analytical requirements. However, the performance of Databricks can vary based on the size and complexity of your data, as well as the configuration of your cluster.

Snowflake: Snowflake is designed for high performance and scalability. It uses a unique architecture that separates storage and compute, allowing you to scale each independently.

This means that you can allocate more resources to compute-intensive tasks without having to increase your storage capacity, or vice versa. Snowflake also offers features like automatic scaling and caching to improve performance.

Ease of use
Databricks: Databricks provides a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to work with Apache Spark.

It offers a variety of tools and features for data exploration, visualization, and collaboration. Databricks also integrates with popular BI tools like Tableau and Power BI, making it easy to create interactive dashboards and reports.

Snowflake: Snowflake is known for its simplicity and ease of use.

It provides a SQL-based interface that is familiar to most data professionals, allowing you to query and analyze data using standard SQL commands. Snowflake also offers a web-based console and a variety of connectors for popular data integration tools, making it easy to load and query data from different sources.

Cost
Databricks: Databricks pricing is based on a combination of compute and storage resources, with additional charges for premium features like machine learning and data visualization.

The cost of Databricks can vary depending on the size and complexity of your data, as well as the number of users and the level of support you require.

Snowflake: Snowflake pricing is based on a pay-as-you-go model, where you only pay for the resources you use.

This makes it easy to scale your usage up or down based on your needs, without having to commit to a fixed contract. Snowflake also offers a variety of pricing options, including on-demand pricing, prepaid capacity, and volume discounts.

Finally, both Databricks and Snowflake are powerful platforms for managing and analyzing large datasets. Databricks is optimized for Apache Spark and offers a wide range of tools for data engineering and data science. Snowflake, on the other hand, is a cloud-based data warehousing platform that is known for its ease of use and performance.

The choice between Databricks and Snowflake depends on your specific requirements and preferences. If you need a platform that is optimized for complex analytics workflows and machine learning, Databricks may be the better choice. However,

if you are looking for a simple and scalable data warehousing solution, Snowflake may be the way to go.

To wrap up, if you’re looking for a technology partner to help you achieve your goals, contact Celerik!

We specialize in providing high-quality nearshoring tech services to help companies achieve their goals. With our extensive expertise and partnerships with industry leaders like Microsoft, AWS, and Databricks, we deliver innovative solutions tailored to your specific needs.

Contact us today to start your journey to success!
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Celerik is a digital product development company specializing in turning our clients’ vision into reality. We build purposeful, results-driven technology solutions that serve as a key to our partners’ transformation. Founded in 2008, our mission has been to craft exceptional products tailored to the needs of our customers.

Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve been hailed again by Clutch, a research and reviews resource, as a top company in Colombia. According to the platform, we’re among the leading app development providers in Latin America!

“For the fourth consecutive time, Celerik has been recognized for delivering world-class technology services and products to the most demanding startups and established businesses in North America.”

— CEO, Celerik

If you didn’t already know, Clutch is a B2B platform that aims to connect organizations of all sizes with the service providers that can help them succeed. Clutch’s review collection methodology is grounded in the principle that each feedback should be unbiased and untampered. Clutch achieves full transparency by interviewing clients of vendors registered on the platform directly.

Here’s what our partners have been saying about our solutions:

“From the CEO to the developers that we have worked with, it feels like they want us to win as much as we do.”

— Dominic Kingston, Founder, The Cartelle Group Ltd.

“They came up with a simple and useful model in a short time which was impressive.”

— Natalia Velasquez Sierra, Business & Strategy Director, Tienda Registrada

Thank you so much to our partners for sharing their honest feedback about our work. You can discover more about our previous and ongoing projects on our Clutch profile.

For inquiries about our solutions, be sure to contact us right away!  

“Receiving this award for the second consecutive year is a major achievement that reflects our company’s goals in becoming a leader in digital enablement for companies in the North American market.”

• Juan Carlos Ramirez, CEO & Co-Founder of Celerik

Here’s also some of the comments from our valued clients who trusted us with their projects:

“They came up with a simple and useful model in a short time which was impressive.”

• Natalia Sierra, Business & Strategy Director of Tienda Registrada

“Their in-house expertise and their willingness to learn about our business model impressed us.”

• Co-Founder & CEO of Tax Automation Platform

“They’re incredibly thorough with everything that they do.”

• Stephen Buzella Sr., CEO of Shutter Tech

You can count on us as we have been servicing clients for over 12 years. For more information about us, contact us today!

Remote work is not exactly a new concept. In the early 70’s, physicist Jack Nilles, realized how telecommunications could replace time-consuming commuting for staff during his work for NASA. Actually, he coined the terms “telecommuting” and “telework” as he worked on projects that would allow employees to work at home.

More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the remote work trend and experts agree that the future of work will never be the same. Growth trends of a growing remote work world were already staggering as FlexJobs notes on their article Remote Work Statistics: Shifting Norms and Expectations early 2020 (kind of before COVID-19):

Celerik has just recently become a fully remote company. Even though before the pandemic we were already flexible enough to be “remote work practitioners”, this new era has definitely pushed us to a decision that honestly, we could have taken years ago.

Technology today allows a great number of industries and jobs to be performed remotely. Lots of people that are new to working from home today dealing with stress, loneliness, and struggling to separate work from personal lives. According to Reuters, 53% of people say working from home increases the risk of family conflict because of the blurred line between private time and work.

To us as a digital company, the reality is that remote work feels just natural, but we’ve still had our challenges and have gone through most of the common hurdles, so we want to share a couple of tips that had made this whole new thing of work from home a gratifying experience:

Digital product development and software design has lots moving parts, and in the very early stages of your startup there are many more questions than answers on how to best start building your product.

When you are developing a new digital product, it can be tempting to immediately start writing code so we can get to market quickly. Why waste time planning, isn’t that old fashioned?  Well, the answer is no, and the key is to avoid planning too far ahead that you end up building a product without validating your assumptions. Instead, we believe in agile product planning.

The ultimate goal of our technical discovery phase is to reduce uncertainty surrounding the development of your product by conducting an agile product design and planning phase.

Why you need to invest in a discovery phase?

First of all, we want to be clear that there is not a single way to carry out a technical discovery. As with agile and Scrum, every company out there has its own flavor to adopt these set of best practices, however, the ultimate goal remains the same: bringing to market a successful MVP.

Our technical discovery process is not intended to replace your customer and insights research phase, most likely already covered if you followed a Google-like Design Sprint. Our technical discovery phase comes just right after, when you should already have a clear and somewhat “validated” vision of a product that we are set out to build with our team.

At Celerik, we are huge fans of agile, but that doesn’t mean we don’t like to follow a systematic approach to product design and building.

How to conduct a technical discovery?

Running a Design Sprint is great to come up with a pre-MVP prototype that has allowed you and your team gather user and market insights. Now that you have a rough idea of what you want to build, it’s time to put your heads together and plan for its build.

Our typical technical discovery phase is made up of 4 stages:

Stage 1 – Business understanding:

Our goal here is to set the stage. We carry out key business context activities that help uncover business and users’ motivations. We use Business Model Canvas®, Value Proposition Canvas® and a competitive analysis, as a preliminary common ground for our team to start collaborating and sharing your same business jargon.

Stage 2 – User experience design

Your products should always usable, enjoyable, and accessible for humans. During this phase we bridge the gap between the user, the development team, and key business stakeholders. User personas and features are uncovered, and wireframes are sketched to graphically capture the result of this stage.

Stage 4 – Product plan

At this closing stage, your newly created product plan is an agile yet comprehensive representation of your vision and how you plan to prioritize your product offering and its functionalities over time. Deliverables include a product roadmap, architecture design, schedule, budget and team required to bring to life your digital product.

What’s next? Have we finished yet?

Now the fun part begins! You and your team are ready to start building your product. This is where agile principles and Scrum will come into play. Don’t forget that your product is a living piece, and the needs of today may not be the same as those of tomorrow.

At the end of the day, your MVP is made for learning and iterating, but one thing is sure at the end of this process: you have a clear plan for the next couple of months.

If you’d like to learn more and see how Celerik can help you build your MVP without breaking the bank, drop us a line!

You surely have heard the expression that there is “no I in the word team,” and it is frequently used in sports to get everyone to think collectively, as well as act in a coordinated way that ensures success. It is unfortunate that the expression is thought of as a cliché because it is appropriate in other settings outside of sports. In fact, in the world of software development, it is far more likely that you’ll see a winning effort when it is a team at work.

In the current business world, we know that a lot of professionals operate in the “gig economy,” or as freelancing entities. Sure, they may align themselves to groups and teams, but for the most part, they operate (and think) in that “I” mindset.

The Trouble with Freelance

If you are on the lookout for a remote software development option, you’ll likely be curious about freelancers. Here’s the problem, while they might be a bit more flexible and less costly, you’ll find they are:

• Less available because they need to keep many projects rolling at once. This means difficulties in communication, deadlines, and more. It also puts you at risk for being dumped if that freelancer is overwhelmed.
• Less controllable because a freelancer works entirely on their own and has no accountability to other team members. Shortcuts can be taken, progress reports can be skimpy or flawed, and any last-minute issues will be far more difficult to troubleshoot.
• Likely to pose more risks around the issue of confidentiality. While it may seem that a group is more difficult when it comes to confidentiality, it is often the case that a freelancer may not sign an NDA or may be prone to discussing other projects with potential clients, jeopardizing your confidentiality.

So, if you are going to hire a remote solution for software development, it just makes sense to lean into a team of developers to help.

Advantages of a Remote Development Team

What does the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) do for your firm? It is likely that he or she plays an executive role and supports ongoing technological needs as well as any R&D role that is required. A CTO may review the long or short-term needs of your company, and use whatever capital is budgeted to him or her to support your business in striking goals or objectives.

The CTO emerged within the past decade as a branch of the CIO and is likely to play a strong role in strategic planning. According to Investopedia, the CTO is also the “highest technology executive position within a company. He or she develops policies and procedures and uses technology to enhance products and services that focus on external customers. The CTO also develops strategies to increase revenue and performs a cost-benefit analysis and return-on-investment analysis.”

That is quite a plate-full, and if you read through this and realize that it may be better to use the collective skill set of a team rather than heaping so many responsibilities on a single individual, you are not alone. Today, and especially during the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis, many firms are leaning into a different solution – the interim CTO team.

Before you argue against this, let’s reconsider the evolution of remote working. The world has been going towards a remote work model for a while now, and technology as well as infrastructure exist to such a degree that it is easier than ever to visualize a permanent shift to this approach. Consider what an article from Forbes said of this: “Technologies like Slack, Zoom or Google Hangouts, Dropbox, etc. are making it easy to be productive as a team while remote.”

Enter the Interim CTO Team

The average salary for a CTO is $159,419 (according to PayScale.com), but may soar as high as $241k, or more. Add in bonuses, profit sharing, commissions, and benefits and the numbers grow substantially larger. Most startups face that significant figure along with the rest of the cost of staffing the company. 

As a hiring priority, though, finding the ideal CTO is important, and yet it is also a major struggle. The CTO happens to be one of the most competitive positions in the job market, and particularly in major urban areas and specific industries. Therefore, the choice to work with an interim CTO makes more sense now than ever before.

Sadly, the interim CTO can be just as difficult to find as the more permanent candidates. And in the current COVID-19 crisis, the ability to interview and screen candidates in the traditional way is limited, at best. The opportunity for face to face meetings has been reduced to screen to screen meetings, and even if a company is adapted to remote workers and remote hiring, the process remains daunting. Fraught with pitfalls, it can start to feel as if progress during the COVID-19 crisis is an untenable goal.

And this is where technology and an interim CTO team can save the day.

5 Benefits of Working with an Interim CTO Team

You know the costs of that single CTO, and even when recruitment is flawless, it is almost impossible to find a single person who can offer the expansive skillset of a group. The interim CTO team is going to offer many benefits, including:

1. A collection of individuals with many skills and experiences that instantly override the tech talent gap for workers in the technology field
2. The ability to meet all product development demands 
3. Avoiding the usual pitfalls of unsustainability in deliverables by utilizing a team of people  
4. Enjoying scalability to a degree impossible with a single CTO or interim CTO
5. Management becomes nimbler and more adept at handling remote or distributed teams, i.e. remote ready (which is in line with emerging trends and sure to become a beneficial capability)

Let’s consider that final point, since it is incredibly relevant during this current COVID-19 crisis. Without the ability to enjoy traditional face time with employees at all levels, it can feel as if there is a lack of defined company culture.

However, when management (whether in a startup or existing firm) has to adapt to managing distributed teams, they begin to also build a culture oriented towards remote success. There will be an emphasis on clear, fast and concise communication. Trust is essential as teams will need the ability to act autonomously in order to hasten growth – an essential during startup.

The CTO who is a “jack of all trades,” is highly desirable but as rare as a unicorn, and as costly. A diverse talent pool is desirable, and possible with the implementation of an interim CTO team. If you are eager to join the Future of Work, today, and during the current COVID-19 crisis, Celerik can help; becoming your digital partner, and helping you build your mobile or web application, enabled by cloud and data science technologies.