Summary The Data industry is changing rapidly, and one of the most active areas of growth is automation of data workflows. Taking cues from the DevOps movement of the past decade data professionals are orienting around the concept of DataOps. More than just a collection of tools, there are a number of organizational and conceptual changes that a proper DataOps approach depends on. In this episode Kevin Stumpf, CTO of Tecton, Maxime Beauchemin, CEO of Preset, and Lior Gavish, CTO of Monte Carlo, discuss the grand vision and present realities of DataOps. They explain how to think about your data systems in a holistic and maintainable fashion, the security challenges that threaten to derail your efforts, and the power of using metadata as the foundation of everything that you do. If you are wondering how to get control of your data platforms and bring all of your stakeholders onto the same page then this conversation is for you.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Modern Data teams are dealing with a lot of complexity in their data pipelines and analytical code. Monitoring data quality, tracing incidents, and testing changes can be daunting and often takes hours to days. Datafold helps Data teams gain visibility and confidence in the quality of their analytical data through data profiling, column-level lineage and intelligent anomaly detection. Datafold also helps automate regression testing of ETL code with its Data Diff feature that instantly shows how a change in ETL or BI code affects the produced data, both on a statistical level and down to individual rows and values. Datafold integrates with all major data warehouses as well as frameworks such as Airflow & dbt and seamlessly plugs into CI workflows. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today to start a 30-day trial of Datafold. Once you sign up and create an alert in Datafold for your company data, they will send you a cool water flask. RudderStack’s smart customer data pipeline is warehouse-first. It builds your customer data warehouse and your identity graph on your data warehouse, with support for Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and more. Their SDKs and plugins make event streaming easy, and their integrations with cloud applications like Salesforce and ZenDesk help you go beyond event streaming. With RudderStack you can use all of your customer data to answer more difficult questions and then send those insights to your whole customer data stack. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Max Beauchemin, Lior Gavish, and Kevin Stumpf about the real world challenges of embracing DataOps practices and systems, and how to keep things secure as you scale

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Before we get started, can you each give your definition of what "DataOps" means to you?

How does this differ from "business as usual" in the data industry? What are some of the things that DataOps isn’t (despite what marketers might say)?

What are the biggest difficulties that you have faced in going from concept to production with a workflow or system intended to power self-serve access to other membe

Summary As more organizations are gaining experience with data management and incorporating analytics into their decision making, their next move is to adopt machine learning. In order to make those efforts sustainable, the core capability they need is for data scientists and analysts to be able to build and deploy features in a self service manner. As a result the feature store is becoming a required piece of the data platform. To fill that need Kevin Stumpf and the team at Tecton are building an enterprise feature store as a service. In this episode he explains how his experience building the Michelanagelo platform at Uber has informed the design and architecture of Tecton, how it integrates with your existing data systems, and the elements that are required for well engineered feature store.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $60 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Do you want to get better at Python? Now is an excellent time to take an online course. Whether you’re just learning Python or you’re looking for deep dives on topics like APIs, memory mangement, async and await, and more, our friends at Talk Python Training have a top-notch course for you. If you’re just getting started, be sure to check out the Python for Absolute Beginners course. It’s like the first year of computer science that you never took compressed into 10 fun hours of Python coding and problem solving. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/talkpython today and get 10% off the course that will help you find your next level. That’s dataengineeringpodcast.com/talkpython, and don’t forget to thank them for supporting the show. You invest so much in your data infrastructure – you simply can’t afford to settle for unreliable data. Fortunately, there’s hope: in the same way that New Relic, DataDog, and other Application Performance Management solutions ensure reliable software and keep application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo’s end-to-end Data Observability Platform monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence. The platform uses machine learning to infer and learn your data, proactively identify data issues, assess its impact through lineage, and notify those who need to know before it impacts the business. By empowering data teams with end-to-end data reliability, Monte Carlo helps organizations save time, increase revenue, and restore trust in their data. Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo today to request a demo and see how Monte Carlo delivers data observability across your data infrastructure. The first 25 will receive a free, limited edition Monte Carlo hat! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Kevin Stumpf about Tecton and the role that the feature store plays in a modern MLOps platform

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing what you are building at Tecton and your motivation for starting the business? For anyone who isn’t familiar with the concept, what is an example of a feature? How do you define what a feature store is? What role does a feature store play in the overall lifecycle of a machine learning p