Talend Data Integration Reviews

Talend Cloud Integration was around when a few of our teams wanted to use the remote engine concept on AWS, and with the on-premise we could not do that. They wanted to use Talend on AWS, where they wanted to spin up their own job servers and to process their own data on the cloud, on their own BPC's. They felt that the transitions happening between on-premise to cloud would be more expensive than if they did it from cloud to cloud or from their VPC to remote engines, building up remote engines. So one reason we switched was cost and the second was that there is no dependency if the job servers go down on on-premise and the business could get impacted. Here, there is none of that. It was a kind of seamless integration between cloud to cloud environments and all those things.

In terms of valuable features, when comparing PMC to TAC, TAC is more centered around the user configuration than the project configuration. If you look at the Talend framework as a whole, you need your Talend administration center, you need a Studio and you need job servers. But there are a few things with respect to job rules, profiling, and project creation which are more advanced in PMC versus TAC. When I say more advanced, in the normal Talend administration center you do not have a super admin and you can have multiple admins who can control their own application. Today, if Talend is used by 10 different applications on TAC, one admin can create those projects for those teams and all other elements which are on-premise. There, you can create multiple admin rules where each application can have its own admins and they can take care of their deployment and they can manage their own environments, etc.... But on the on-premise solution you do not have that, which is a disadvantage.

Let's say in an organization there are multiple applications using Talend. If you run on TAC, you have one admin who has to manage all these projects - assigning projects, creating user rules, providing them access to different environments, you have a dev test and fraud environment. All those things have to be managed by a single admin or maybe one or two admins who have access. But in TMC, which is the Talend management console, you can create sub-admins.

One would be a super admin and you can create those sub-admins who take care of all these things. If I have five applications that are using this solution and I am the admin I don't have to understand their use case and how they want to deploy and all those things. I just give the rules to that admin and that admin takes care of everything. The super admin gives it to those application admins and the application admins can take care of their environment, their deployment process, and creating user rules, etc...

Another thing about the cloud solution is that you don't have to worry about any upgrades. On-premise you have to upgrade your TAC and then you have to upgrade your Studio, which is an effort and time consuming. But on cloud there are automated upgrades, where they get automatically pushed. Then with the Studios, you have to just upgrade that. That is a backwards compatibility. For example, if your Studio is on 7.1 and then the remote engine is on 7.3, that is a backward compatibility. But it's advisable to upgrade your Studios as soon as your cloud instances get upgraded.

In terms of what could be improved, there is not much. It's a basic server setup. It all depends upon what kind of software you want to put on that server. With the remote engine you are building an EC2 or you are setting up an EC2 instance and then pushing all your software there and then running it from there. I don't see any challenges with that.

I have been working with Talend Cloud Integration for about 3 years.

I haven't seen any issues with stability, it's pretty stable.

The scalability depends upon how many you have. If you are looking with respect to performance, the scalability can be whether your job servers are always available, then it is scalable. But if you're looking with respect to performance and you need more job servers, you have to strategize it in a way where you get more tokens to spin up more remote engines.

In terms of pricing, they have the concept of tokens. They give you a certain number of tokens per license. If you have less tokens, then you will have less servers for execution, and that also ties back to the number of licensed servers that you have procured. But if you want more tokens for the remote engines, I think it is around $2000 for maybe 10,000 tokens or a hundred tokens, I don't remember so don't quote me here, you have to pay more to acquire more tokens.

My advice for anyone implementing this solution with respect to the remote engine and TMC connections is that it all depends upon the enterprise. Whether they have single VPC's where they scale up or multiple VPC's where they want to spin up. The cost increases or decreases based upon the strategy. So if I have my remote engine set up on-premise and I want to run the jobs from cloud, the cost will vary, and if you have the VPC to VPC connection then your cost will remain the same. With respect to reliability and with respect to scalability, if you need more job servers, let's say you are trying to process some terabytes or gigabytes or petabytes of data, and if you have two or three Talend licenses on cloud, then I would recommend buying more tokens so they can spin up more remote engines.

The tokenization and the detokenization also apply with this solution like in the 7.3.

I would rate Talend Cloud Integration an eight. The reason is that there are no concurrent licenses, they only have seat licenses on cloud. That's the whole challenge. For example, if in any project your headcount increases or decreases, you do not have that concurrence and you have a seat license, you run into challenges because you have to procure a few more licenses for getting the job done. That's why I would rate them at eight out of 10.

I'm very passionate about this solution because if you look at any other tool that costs around $200 - $300,000, like Delphix which costs you a million dollars, Talend is very cheap and is almost is at par with what others can do. There is one thing which Delphix does which Talend cannot do, but overall, I would say apart from that, if you're looking for a solution, you should give it a try.