Data Platform
Lakehouse vs warehouse: the choice nobody wants to make twice
How to evaluate the modern data platform options without locking yourself into a five-year regret.
Read article →The patterns in this article come from our work with large enterprises across regulated and fast-moving sectors. The aim is not to be exhaustive - it is to surface the handful of decisions we see making the biggest difference in practice.
1. Where the money actually goes
Across our enterprise engagements, the same handful of patterns drives a disproportionate share of cloud cost: idle non-production environments, oversized data pipelines, chatty cross-region traffic, and storage that nobody owns. None of these are solved by procurement.
2. Make cost visible where decisions are made
If engineers cannot see the cost of the change they are making in the same place they make it, optimisation becomes someone else’s job. Tagging, showback dashboards and pull-request cost previews change that overnight.
3. Pair FinOps with reliability, not just finance
The most effective FinOps functions sit close to SRE and platform teams, not finance. They speak both languages - they can translate a cost spike into an architectural change, and an architectural change into a cost forecast.
4. Avoid the savings theatre
It is tempting to celebrate the first round of easy savings (rightsizing, reserved instances) as a victory. The harder, more durable wins come from architecture changes, data lifecycle policies and decommissioning unused services. That is where senior attention belongs.
Where to start
If any of the above resonates with what you are working through, we are always happy to compare notes - without obligation. Email is the best way to reach us: customerservices@halfteck.com.