Startups are serving up plenty of options when it comes to more effective data platform solutions.

An ecosystem of newly founded companies has developed around the cloud-native portfolio of Amazon Web Services Inc., and this is fueling the creation of innovative offerings for the data as code movement. Novel approaches to data governance, data lakes and streamlined tools for developers are just a few of the outcomes from this collaboration between startups and the world’s largest public cloud provider.

During the recent AWS Startup Showcase: “Data as Code: The Future of Enterprise Data and Analytics” event, theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, and AWS examined how an ecosystem of startup companies is offering new ways for enterprises to manage data in cloud-native systems. (* Disclosure below.)

Here are three insights you might have missed:

1. Companies want a self-service data model, and this requires well-planned governance

AWS has taken a simple approach to good data governance: Figure out how to define access, and then get out of the way.

It is the first part of this strategy harboring the most challenges. Organizations often create overly rigid governance scenarios, using a central entity to handle the responsibility. This will usually create a bottleneck that slows progress as lines of business funnel into a queue for approval.

In theCUBE’s interview with Rahul Pathak (pictured), the AWS executive outlined how his company is working with customers to develop a modern data governance framework. This includes matching access control policies with entities that have permission to act on data in a distributed environment and using the cloud to track interactions as needed.

AWS’ approach is becoming more important as enterprises recognize the role of data democratization, where larger communities of users and customers can access information.

“One of the big trends that we see is customers looking for the ability to make self-service data available to their end users,” Pathak said. “The key to that is good foundational governance. Once you have defined good access controls, you are more comfortable setting data free.”

2. Dremio Arctic and Apache Iceberg could put data warehouses in the deep freeze

In March, data lake platform provider Dremio Corp. announced a faster query engine and a new data management layer built on open-source Apache Iceberg. Company executives believe that by making data lakes more attractive to businesses for analytics, data warehouses will ultimately have less impact in the enterprise.

Apache Iceberg offers a high-performance format for extremely large analytic tables. Dremio is combining its Iceberg capabilities with Arctic, a new data metastore that will work with Dremio Cloud. Arctic optimizes data in a data lakehouse, eliminating a need for manual partitioning or file rightsizing that chews up engineering time.

With its latest announcements, Dremio is positioning data lakehouses as a more attractive alternative to traditional data warehouse systems. In the process, the company is laying the groundwork for data as code.

“We have customers doing very interesting things, very data application things, like building really high-performance data into use cases,” said Mark Lyons, vice president of product management at Dremio, in an interview during the Showcase event. “Dremio Arctic is a full Git-like experience for the data. Data as code is going to open up a whole new world of things that we don’t even know about today.”

3. Hot video streaming sector spawned ecosystem of new tools for developers

Netflix helped ignite the video-on-demand industry. Peloton ushered in the era of video fitness. Zoom became a household name for connecting people via video during a global pandemic.

Video streaming is hot, and this is giving rise to an ecosystem of companies that provide tools for developers to build new apps designed to meet the technology challenges for distributed video content. Mux Inc., which enables developers to stream video seamlessly across connections and devices through simple APIs, has seen 300% growth of on-demand video streaming and 3700% growth of live video streamed by its clients.

Mux achieved unicorn status last year, with a valuation over $1 billion. It made its first acquisition in January, purchasing Stream Club to strengthen its developer-focused services for building studio experiences directly into applications.

Developers must cope with issues around compression, encoding, and the varying format standards for the devices on which video may be played. Mux has focused on providing developers with the capabilities they need to create and broadcast quality video streams in a highly challenging environment.

“I think it’s kind of a miracle every time a video plays on the internet because the internet is not a medium designed for video,” said Jon Dahl, co-founder and chief executive officer of Mux, during an interview with theCUBE. “Video is 70% of internet traffic today in an unreliable, sort of untrusted network space, which is totally different than how television used to work. Video is hard because there’s so many problems from top to bottom. If you want to put video online, you build complex software, and that’s the exact problem that Mux has started to help solve.”

You can catch up on SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s complete coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: “Data as Code — The Future of Enterprise Data and Analytics” event on theCUBE’s dedicated event channel.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Startup Showcase: “Data as Code — The Future of Enterprise Data and Analytics” event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE