Hi everyone, I've been lurking here for a while and finally decided to post. I'm currently in the early planning stages of moving our old customer data setup to something more modern. Everyone on my team is pushing for one of the big, all-in-one packaged CDPs—it's the safe choice, I get it.
But I keep looking at the cost and the lock-in, and I can't help but wonder... am I the only one who thinks a composable approach might be better? Like, using separate best-of-breed tools for data ingestion, a warehouse like Snowflake or BigQuery, and then a reverse ETL tool for activation? My background is more in cloud migration, so maybe I'm just seeing it through that "lift and shift, but modular" lens.
I'm nervous about the packaged route because of past experiences migrating legacy systems. They always promise simplicity, but then you hit a wall when you need to do something they didn't anticipate. 😅 With a composable stack, at least you can swap out a piece if it isn't working.
Could anyone share realistic timelines or step-by-step guidance for going the composable route? Specifically for someone coming from an on-prem database world? I'm thinking AWS or Azure cloud, but I'm worried about the integration complexity. Is it a nightmare to manage, or is the flexibility worth the initial setup pain?
One step at a time