If you have managed a cloud data platform, you have undoubtedly gotten that call. You know the one, it's usually from finance or the office of the CFO, inquiring about your monthly spend. And it usually comes in one of two forms: While both are clear and present dangers to cloud data platform owners, they don’t have to be.

Are you considering venturing into the world of analytics engineering? Analytics engineers are the newest addition to data teams and sit somewhere between data engineers and data analysts. They are technical, business savvy, and love to learn. A huge part of an analytics engineer’s role is learning new modern data tools to implement within data stacks.

Recently, I published an article on whether self-service BI is attainable, and spoiler alert: it certainly is. Of course, anything of value usually does require a bit of planning, collaboration, and effort. After the article was published, I began having conversations with technical leaders, analysts, and analytics engineers, and the topic of data modeling for self-service analytics came up repeatedly.