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September 11, 2018

Attunity Brings CDC to Google Cloud

Enterprises that are looking to push transactional data from on-premise systems into Google’s cloud environment may want to check out the latest from Attunity, which today announced support for Google Cloud Platform with its change data capture (CDC) software.

Attunity already supported Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure with its CDC software, which automatically detects changes made to production data repositories and replicates those changes to target systems in a ready-to-use format. And now that it supports Google Cloud Platform, it has all three major cloud providers covered.

“We’ve seen an awful lot of interest among our clients in Google in the last six months,” says Dan Potter, Attunity’s vice president of product management and marketing. “We’ve had our toe into the water with Google for the last year or so with a couple of different sources, but now we’re making a big push and the announcement at Strata around Google.”

There are similarities in how Attunity’s software supports GCP and the other clouds. In all three cases, Attunity can replicate data in real time from 27 supported sources into the cloud vendor’s object store, which is S3 on AWS, ADLS on Azure, and Google Cloud Storage on GCP. The company also supports loading changed data directly into various specialty analytic environments running in the cloud, such as AWS’s RedShift or EMR, or Azure’s SQL Data Warehouse or HDInsight.

Attunity supports a range of data sources with its CDC software

With the Google support, Attunity is adding a little something extra to the mix. According to Potter, the company is utilizing Google’s DataProc technology to build more advanced data transformation capabilities into its GCP offering with the aim of minimizing the amount of scripting and other data transformation tasks required by data scientists and analysts to prepare the data.

“Not only do we land the data in real time in Google, but we create structures that can be used for analytic processes,” Potter says. “We’re completely resilient to changes. As metadata changes on those sources systems, we pick up those changes and we automatically, on the Google Cloud side, reapply those changes. So if the table structure changes on a source system, we pick it up, and apply the change, and the analytics continue to run unabated.”

Of course, there’s nothing stopping customers from developing their own Spark transformations on data that Attunity Replicate is moving to GCP. Attunity doesn’t present any restrictions on what users do with their data. They could write their own scripts, or even use Flink, Beam, or other frameworks supported DataProc.

“But what we found,” Potter says, “is that if we can automate the next step, which is to merge the data to provide a historical as well as the operational data store view – that’s the real value. Because now I’m fully automating that end-to-end process to go from the data ingest right down analytics-ready data.”

Potter says it used the DataProc implementations of Hive and Spark to build the system that automates those transformational tasks. Eventually, Attunity will offer similar capabilities on Azure and AWS, but for now it’s a GCP-only affair.

“We’re using Spark as the core transformation engine. We’re using Hive as the standard way they can access data structures that we build,” he says. “By using Spark, we can create all kinds of different structures in different tech. Spark is really powerful and flexible. It’s been great.”

The surge of interest in cloud computing has definitely been a good thing for Attunity. The company, which trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol “ATTU,” enjoyed an 86% increase in license revenue last quarter, and Potter says the cloud played a very big role in that.

“It’s very popular,” Potter says. “We’re on a tear as a company. It’s very much a direct result of these transformative data infrastructure moves to the cloud, to data lakes in the cloud, to streaming architectures. These are transformative moves and they’re recognizing that change data capture as a way to provide real-time data integration is a great style for the cloud.”

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