From Designing Cloud Data Platforms by Danil Zburivsky and Lynda Partner

In this article, we’ll layer some of the critical and more advanced functionality needed for most data platforms today. Without this added layer of sophistication your data platform would work but it wouldn’t scale easily, nor would it meet the growing data velocity challenges. It would also be limited in terms of the types of data consumers (people and systems who consume the data from the platform) it supports, as they’re also growing in both numbers and variety.