October 2021 Summaries

Yanna Winter, Generali's CIO for Global Corporate and Commercial (GC&C) and Generali UK, discusses the company's modernization journey and development of a future-ready data platform with help from DataStax and partner Fincons Group. The transformation strategy includes infrastructure transformation, moving everything to cloud by 2020, and focusing on application modernization in 2022. Generali benefits from greater flexibility in its new environment, enabling it to deal with challenges such as Brexit and IFRS 17. Working with Fincons Group provides the necessary strategy for migrating fully to the new technology stack. DataStax's solution enables a single data lake, supporting applications, data analytics, data governance, and data quality in one place. The IT strategy is focused on divide, conquer, and integrate, improving self-service for business and promoting data governance.

The recent KubeCon North America 2021 event highlighted emerging trends in open source and cloud-native communities. Data on Kubernetes (DoK) was a key focus, with discussions around running databases, configuring storage, and managing entire stacks within Kubernetes. Two main themes emerged from the conference: edge computing and multi-cluster Kubernetes. Edge computing is becoming increasingly important as workloads spread globally, while multi-cluster Kubernetes allows organizations to be cloud-agnostic and run applications in multiple regions or data centers. The event also showcased lightweight Kubernetes distributions like k3s and k0s, designed for limited-resource hardware.

The "Data on Kubernetes 2021" report reveals that running stateful workloads on Kubernetes has turned from a minority to a majority trend, with 70% of respondents embracing it. This shift is attributed to Kubernetes' improvements in handling stateful workloads and the industry's overall maturity in managing any workloads within the platform. Despite challenges in finding qualified personnel for adopting new technology, businesses using Kubernetes reported being twice as productive after adoption. The report highlights that declarative infrastructure is a super-power, allowing teams to focus on creating applications their customers love while ensuring consistency and reliability.

The text discusses the importance of GraphQL and open source for application developers, architects, and full stack developers working with infrastructure systems. It highlights how data gateways simplify challenges in application development and data management, and emphasizes the role of JavaScript as a dominant language in web applications. The text also explores the benefits of GraphQL for data federation and its compatibility with various database technologies. Furthermore, it advocates for open standards and open source solutions to enable collaboration and industry-wide progress. DataStax's Stargate project is mentioned as an example of a successful open source initiative that supports GraphQL and Cassandra databases.