Stuart Main

Every year at Big Data LDN, attendees leave inspired by enterprise-scale data platforms and AI-powered analytics, only to discover that the price tag puts them out of reach. This session tells a different story. After attending Big Data LDN 2025 with a clear objective—to replace our decade-old HTML and MySQL reporting platform with something modern, scalable and affordable—we partnered with MotherDuck and Astrato to build an enterprise-grade analytics stack that a not-for-profit could actually sustain. We'll share the real journey: the architectural decisions, migration challenges and trade-offs involved in moving from a fragile legacy reporting environment to a cloud-native platform that empowers staff with self-service analytics. We'll also discuss what surprised us, what we'd do differently, and how we approached vendor pricing as a charity. This is not a polished vendor case study but a practitioner's account of delivering enterprise analytics under real financial constraints. If your organisation has been priced out of modern data platforms, you'll leave with practical ideas for building a scalable analytics capability without an enterprise budget.

This session covers network design approaches for VMware Cloud on AWS with best practices to build connectivity to customer VPCs, native AWS services, and on-premises data centers using AWS Transit Gateway, AWS Direct Connect, and VPN.