Most companies do not need Snowflake or Databricks

open source it may be. free it is not. paying an expert to correctly deploy an open source solution takes time and money.

oh you want it maintained?

the three recommendations sound like those of a consultant. they work great with exec buy-in, and are a joke without.

yes, yes, you just have to explain yourself. just help management understand. justification is part of the role. how long does that take, and how much effort? (the answer is subjective and contextual.)

to be blunt, this kind of advice is barely more than “do better.” it ignores the situational example of using snowflake cheaply. it acts like most devs aren’t just going to go fire up a postgres rds - you said open source! it oversimplifies all problems, implicitly, to you.

> Pay to make a problem disappear.

no, pay to change the parameters of the problem. this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how to get things done in a constrained environment. it isn’t either/or, and every saas comes with problems. you pay to trade problems. otherwise it wouldn’t be worth a blog post name dropping and shitting on databricks and snowflake costs. in the hands of an untrained user or in a sufficiently constrained environment, they cost a lot - that’s one of the problems you buy. cost management.

> a talk with your local Dev Ops Engineer/ manager to discuss how to secure your implementations

again, hope you’ve taken the time to build these bridges. the author does indicate this is most important.

and it has a cost. someone is building that bridge, and likely someone from each side.

you sometimes pay vendors to deal with technical problems so you can deal with non-technical ones.

most importantly, don’t assume a random stranger on the internet has sufficient context to give you worthwhile recommendations.

I don't do a whole lot of data analytics anymore, but I'd say: Start with figuring out how much data you actually have. We still see companies claim to have vast amounts of data, but in reality they are talking about less than a TB of data, frequently just a few 100GB. When you operate at that scale, just chuck your data into whatever database you're comfortable with and do SQL queries, it's fine.

Once you hit the scale where you have "enough" data I'd agree with many of the other comments: Managing open source or home grown solutions quickly become more expensive than just paying for a service. Not quite the same, but we considered deploying a few solutions on OpenStack, but once you paid for training and staff it turned out to be cheaper to just give VMWare more money.

junior ic being asked to sign a contract makes zero sense. that’s insanity. plenty of managers at plenty of companies lack that level of authority.

sales teams use slimy tactics. that’s a given. time limits, multi-years, etc, etc, etc. trying to get the wrong person to sign is a different category entirely.

maybe you ran across the “best of the best” sales people there, but, this sounds sufficiently outlandish that i have to question it a bit.