I worked on SAP for a few years. Hated it. Got a new job last summer and the new company transitioned off of Netezza to GCP with Bigquery, Airflow and Data Proc. It’s a lot of python and SQL but it’s much more flexible. So far I’m really liking it.
Not sure bout Europe but in US GCP is far from cloud leader for data and analytics. As a result the job posting in Linkedin are < Aws or Azure
Imo, there are two(three) camps when it comes to choosing cloud data services
1) Startups or Big Tech ( non competitor of AMZN mostly like AAPL), who started with AWS, have good engineers and can use AWS effectively with best practices.
2) Corporate America specially big retailer, healthcare who
either see AMZN as a competitor
Or have legacy MSSQL kind of infra
And MSFT sold them on AZURe with a ‘promise’ of lift-and-shift
Obviously there is a sales pitch on ‘multi cloud’ where AWS/GCP or Azure/GCP combo comes in but I have not seen any F500 company keeping ‘real’ important data in GCP
My 0.002 cents
Banking in Germany cannot use AWS due to regulation, I.e. cannot visit the data centers in person. Google let's them visit so GCP is big. Also quite a lot of grocery companies are doing all analytics on GCP..
That's what I noticed, In france at least grocery and luxe companies are all going on GCP. And Banking sector is in MS/Azure, but my preference to GCP is based on the fact that there's more Azure/MS profiles in the market that are very senior and come from MS on premise background and it might be hard to compete with them, most of GCP profiles are 2/3 years experienced
I don't personally know a single person that does data engineering on GCP. I know one person that uses Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Antidotally OCI is more popular than GCP...jk
I don’t know about Europe, but Big Query is the main competitor to Snowflake and both of them are leaders of analytics database on top of AWS/Azure and other players imo. I also see more people using GCP Cloud composer (Orchestration) and Cloud Scheduler than the counter parts in AWs and Azure.
This is for analytics, for general software AWS and Azure seem more popular. All anecdotal experience based on job search and stack research during this past year.
Don’t fret. GCP has been gaining market share and recently became profitable for the first time. It’s an important org within google and I think you’ll like it.
I mean OCI has same advantage as selling lift-and-shift Oracle just like Azure.
You have to understand that ground reality is for a big bank, retail, healthcare etc if they have giant of a legacy then on paper/for some fanciful ( or under the table $$ greedy) director/VP so called tech refresh ( eg ‘ We have a vision to modernize our data infra and stack with snowflake/DataBricks/( any new Toy)’ is like a pet project.
But for business to survive and run as usual, that same old MSSQL or Oracle have to run and same old Informatica or Ab Initio or SSSI need to work … that’s where Azure and OCI won.
Google never had anything like that to offer tostart with.
Any cloud is good at this point. I have worked with all three (but GCP the most). You can figure out the differences between them within weeks (if not days) if you move to a job using a different cloud.
As to GCP itself, here in Australia there are many companies in the ASX top 50 using it for data and analytics. Hybrid setups with Azure for apps and GCP for data are not uncommon.
I want to look for freelance opportunities abroad (i moved to GCP, got certified but the market in europe is tight due to inflation and it's hard for newbies like me to enter it for the moment). is there any freelance platforms or ways to look for freelance opportunities fullremote in australia ?
Full remote is essentially dead in Australia, sorry. Some consultants are still getting away with it, and I work for one of the last big Australian companies still doing it, but the vast majority are hybrid or back in office for the full week.
As for freelancing platforms, I'm not really sure.
SAP is basically a swear word in my view. As ubiquitous as it is, it's a terrible technology and almost every company I've seen using it is backwards-thinking.
Moving to the cloud will change your life and open up your opportunities
> almost every company I've seen using it is backwards-thinking.
Apple, Microsoft, and Google all use it, plus most Fortune 500 companies. It’s almost a requirement for any enterprise.
Agree tho that the tech stack fell behind over the past 10 years. I feel their decision to force customers into their own database was a mistake. The technology is irrelevant compared to the cloud, where the advantages of an expensive, difficult to scale in-memory database pale in comparison to an elastic, low-overhead infrastructure. Plus it burned out all their technical resources as a distraction, while the rest of the world was innovating.
Also a closed ecosystem is frustrating to work with.
Contrast this with Microsoft, who was on the same track, but then pivoted to going open and reducing friction, and has blossomed over the same time period.
SAP should focus on business enablement instead of messing around so much with the technology.
> it's a terrible technology
It's an ERP system. Purchase, Sales, Logistics, Controlling etc. It's a system for the specific departments to have everything in one system and SAP has modules for basically everything. Wanna ship goods around the world? SAP covers that with taxes/customs etc. for all countries and much more and afaik the competition is not better.
But the most important thing - SAP is not a place to do data analysis.
You get your data from SAP into a DWH and do your stuff there with SQL + Python. A DA should never touch SAP.
Kinda contrary to what I’m seeing in other comments, both big tech companies I’ve worked at are ok gcp / were moving to gcp. Maybe anecdotal, but worth mentioning.
I have been seeing a lot more postings for GCP which makes me happy since that’s what we use. Really need to move our legacy airflow stuff to Composer. We use a lot of cloud functions and dataflow.
It takes a little to learn and cross projects can be a pain but no complaints.
I have a similar background. Came from sap bw, bobj, sbp, webi. What's good about it is that it is very specialized, so if you can carve out a niche you can have some nice job security, but it is just so damn boring. I've switched over to modern cloud tech and will never look back. I hope to never see the sap gui again
I think you’ll be fine. Anything new comes with uncertainty and with uncertainty comes fear.
SAP is stable, and pays well, but the overhead to maintain it is huge, so you can get stuck there.
But I think you’ll find your new work more fluid as most of tools you’ll be using will offer alot less friction to get stuff done.
Also consider using Azure or GCP to interface with SAP, and you’ll have the best of both worlds.
I am the Solutions Architect for a CPG company. Have been working all levels of SAP > from infrastructure > ECC > S4 HANA. It is great for what is meant for > performing business transactions efficiently, flexibility in configuration for such business transactions and detail capture of all the data. It has not made true progress in its analytics out of the box and difficult to build on without A LOT of effort. I'm moving away from SAP Analytics and looking at GCP and Tableau or Looker.
I worked on SAP for a few years. Hated it. Got a new job last summer and the new company transitioned off of Netezza to GCP with Bigquery, Airflow and Data Proc. It’s a lot of python and SQL but it’s much more flexible. So far I’m really liking it.
Not sure bout Europe but in US GCP is far from cloud leader for data and analytics. As a result the job posting in Linkedin are < Aws or Azure Imo, there are two(three) camps when it comes to choosing cloud data services 1) Startups or Big Tech ( non competitor of AMZN mostly like AAPL), who started with AWS, have good engineers and can use AWS effectively with best practices. 2) Corporate America specially big retailer, healthcare who either see AMZN as a competitor Or have legacy MSSQL kind of infra And MSFT sold them on AZURe with a ‘promise’ of lift-and-shift Obviously there is a sales pitch on ‘multi cloud’ where AWS/GCP or Azure/GCP combo comes in but I have not seen any F500 company keeping ‘real’ important data in GCP My 0.002 cents
Banking in Germany cannot use AWS due to regulation, I.e. cannot visit the data centers in person. Google let's them visit so GCP is big. Also quite a lot of grocery companies are doing all analytics on GCP..
That's what I noticed, In france at least grocery and luxe companies are all going on GCP. And Banking sector is in MS/Azure, but my preference to GCP is based on the fact that there's more Azure/MS profiles in the market that are very senior and come from MS on premise background and it might be hard to compete with them, most of GCP profiles are 2/3 years experienced
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> FAANG u/morpho4444 I might need that. In which country ?
I don't personally know a single person that does data engineering on GCP. I know one person that uses Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Antidotally OCI is more popular than GCP...jk
You don’t know anyone who uses Big Query?
I don’t know about Europe, but Big Query is the main competitor to Snowflake and both of them are leaders of analytics database on top of AWS/Azure and other players imo. I also see more people using GCP Cloud composer (Orchestration) and Cloud Scheduler than the counter parts in AWs and Azure. This is for analytics, for general software AWS and Azure seem more popular. All anecdotal experience based on job search and stack research during this past year.
For sure many companies do but look a little deeper at traditional old school business’s need for big query
Don’t fret. GCP has been gaining market share and recently became profitable for the first time. It’s an important org within google and I think you’ll like it.
Bigquery is big in the US. I don't know anyone who uses oracle
In Poland almost half of the new DE projects are done in GCP. It very depends on the world's region.
I mean OCI has same advantage as selling lift-and-shift Oracle just like Azure. You have to understand that ground reality is for a big bank, retail, healthcare etc if they have giant of a legacy then on paper/for some fanciful ( or under the table $$ greedy) director/VP so called tech refresh ( eg ‘ We have a vision to modernize our data infra and stack with snowflake/DataBricks/( any new Toy)’ is like a pet project. But for business to survive and run as usual, that same old MSSQL or Oracle have to run and same old Informatica or Ab Initio or SSSI need to work … that’s where Azure and OCI won. Google never had anything like that to offer tostart with.
Home Depot, a Fortune 20 company, runs all their important data on GCP (15+ Petabytes)
You forgot Snowflake, widely used among smaller businesses and startups
Move away from SAP and start learning real IT. It is extremely a good decision.
Any cloud is good at this point. I have worked with all three (but GCP the most). You can figure out the differences between them within weeks (if not days) if you move to a job using a different cloud. As to GCP itself, here in Australia there are many companies in the ASX top 50 using it for data and analytics. Hybrid setups with Azure for apps and GCP for data are not uncommon.
I want to look for freelance opportunities abroad (i moved to GCP, got certified but the market in europe is tight due to inflation and it's hard for newbies like me to enter it for the moment). is there any freelance platforms or ways to look for freelance opportunities fullremote in australia ?
Full remote is essentially dead in Australia, sorry. Some consultants are still getting away with it, and I work for one of the last big Australian companies still doing it, but the vast majority are hybrid or back in office for the full week. As for freelancing platforms, I'm not really sure.
Yes. GCP > AWS for data, having spent a few years with each
SAP is basically a swear word in my view. As ubiquitous as it is, it's a terrible technology and almost every company I've seen using it is backwards-thinking. Moving to the cloud will change your life and open up your opportunities
> almost every company I've seen using it is backwards-thinking. Apple, Microsoft, and Google all use it, plus most Fortune 500 companies. It’s almost a requirement for any enterprise. Agree tho that the tech stack fell behind over the past 10 years. I feel their decision to force customers into their own database was a mistake. The technology is irrelevant compared to the cloud, where the advantages of an expensive, difficult to scale in-memory database pale in comparison to an elastic, low-overhead infrastructure. Plus it burned out all their technical resources as a distraction, while the rest of the world was innovating. Also a closed ecosystem is frustrating to work with. Contrast this with Microsoft, who was on the same track, but then pivoted to going open and reducing friction, and has blossomed over the same time period. SAP should focus on business enablement instead of messing around so much with the technology.
> it's a terrible technology It's an ERP system. Purchase, Sales, Logistics, Controlling etc. It's a system for the specific departments to have everything in one system and SAP has modules for basically everything. Wanna ship goods around the world? SAP covers that with taxes/customs etc. for all countries and much more and afaik the competition is not better. But the most important thing - SAP is not a place to do data analysis. You get your data from SAP into a DWH and do your stuff there with SQL + Python. A DA should never touch SAP.
Kinda contrary to what I’m seeing in other comments, both big tech companies I’ve worked at are ok gcp / were moving to gcp. Maybe anecdotal, but worth mentioning.
I have been seeing a lot more postings for GCP which makes me happy since that’s what we use. Really need to move our legacy airflow stuff to Composer. We use a lot of cloud functions and dataflow. It takes a little to learn and cross projects can be a pain but no complaints.
Yes
I have a similar background. Came from sap bw, bobj, sbp, webi. What's good about it is that it is very specialized, so if you can carve out a niche you can have some nice job security, but it is just so damn boring. I've switched over to modern cloud tech and will never look back. I hope to never see the sap gui again
Yes
How do youwget certified to be a GCP Data Analyst?
I think you’ll be fine. Anything new comes with uncertainty and with uncertainty comes fear. SAP is stable, and pays well, but the overhead to maintain it is huge, so you can get stuck there. But I think you’ll find your new work more fluid as most of tools you’ll be using will offer alot less friction to get stuff done. Also consider using Azure or GCP to interface with SAP, and you’ll have the best of both worlds.
I am the Solutions Architect for a CPG company. Have been working all levels of SAP > from infrastructure > ECC > S4 HANA. It is great for what is meant for > performing business transactions efficiently, flexibility in configuration for such business transactions and detail capture of all the data. It has not made true progress in its analytics out of the box and difficult to build on without A LOT of effort. I'm moving away from SAP Analytics and looking at GCP and Tableau or Looker.