Summary In this episode Praveen Gujar, Director of Product at LinkedIn, talks about the intricacies of product management for data and analytical platforms. Praveen shares his journey from Amazon to Twitter and now LinkedIn, highlighting his extensive experience in building data products and platforms, digital advertising, AI, and cloud services. He discusses the evolving role of product managers in data-centric environments, emphasizing the importance of clean, reliable, and compliant data. Praveen also delves into the challenges of building scalable data platforms, the need for organizational and cultural alignment, and the critical role of product managers in bridging the gap between engineering and business teams. He provides insights into the complexities of platformization, the significance of long-term planning, and the necessity of having a strong relationship with engineering teams. The episode concludes with Praveen offering advice for aspiring product managers and discussing the future of data management in the context of AI and regulatory compliance.

Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data managementData lakes are notoriously complex. For data engineers who battle to build and scale high quality data workflows on the data lake, Starburst is an end-to-end data lakehouse platform built on Trino, the query engine Apache Iceberg was designed for, with complete support for all table formats including Apache Iceberg, Hive, and Delta Lake. Trusted by teams of all sizes, including Comcast and Doordash. Want to see Starburst in action? Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/starburst and get $500 in credits to try Starburst Galaxy today, the easiest and fastest way to get started using Trino.Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Praveen Gujar about product management for data and analytical platformsInterview IntroductionHow did you get involved in the area of data management?Product management is typically thought of as being oriented toward customer facing functionality and features. What is involved in being a product manager for data systems?Many data-oriented products that are customer facing require substantial technical capacity to serve those use cases. How does that influence the process of determining what features to provide/create?investment in technical capacity/platformsidentifying groupings of features that can be served by a common platform investmentmanaging organizational pressures between engineering, product, business, finance, etc.What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen "Data Products & Platforms @ Big-tech" used?What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on "Building Data Products & Platforms for Big-tech"?When is "Data Products & Platforms @ Big-tech" the wrong choice?What do you have planned for the future of "Data Products & Platforms @ Big-tech"?Contact Info LinkedInWebsiteParting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The AI Engineering Podcast is your guide to the fast-moving world of building AI systems.Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected] with your story.Links DataHubPodcast EpisodeRAG == Retrieval Augmented GenerationThe intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Lightning talks from local practitioners and sponsors

Keynote address about growing the green cloud

Lightning talk focusing on FinOps by Alan Lapington.

Join Kirk and Joe, as they Detail Joe's journey from a farm in Michigan, to leading a data center company in Dallas. Transitioning from tech roles at Disney and Amazon to spearheading AWS's expansion into Asia and how it changed his decision-making approach. They also speak on optimizing data center locations for connectivity and efficiency and explore the data center industry's evolution. They emphasize the fusion of cloud computing and AI and the growing demand for skilled professionals in companies like Digital Bridge and Databank. They also discuss the societal impact of technology in education and healthcare, envisioning AI's role in revolutionizing service delivery through energy solutions like hydrogen and geothermal sources. Wrapping up they discuss its impact on industries like weather prediction and drug development, emphasizing the need for employee investment and growth-centric cultures.

Thank you to our Title Sponsor MCIS - Mission Critical Interior Solutions, Inc. provides interior architectural solutions for data, cloud, and mission critical centers across North America. We offer everything from polished, epoxy, and sealed concrete to raised flooring, hot/cold aisle containment, and high-density ceiling grid. We also install raised access flooring in office spaces and provide underfloor air distribution testing to commission spaces - https://mcis-inc.com

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Summary Postgres is one of the most widely respected and liked database engines ever. To make it even easier to use for developers to use, Nikita Shamgunov decided to makee it serverless, so that it can scale from zero to infinity. In this episode he explains the engineering involved to make that possible, as well as the numerous details that he and his team are packing into the Neon service to make it even more attractive for anyone who wants to build on top of Postgres. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data managementData lakes are notoriously complex. For data engineers who battle to build and scale high quality data workflows on the data lake, Starburst is an end-to-end data lakehouse platform built on Trino, the query engine Apache Iceberg was designed for, with complete support for all table formats including Apache Iceberg, Hive, and Delta Lake. Trusted by teams of all sizes, including Comcast and Doordash. Want to see Starburst in action? Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/starburst and get $500 in credits to try Starburst Galaxy today, the easiest and fastest way to get started using Trino.Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Nikita Shamgunov about his work on making Postgres a serverless database at Neon.Interview IntroductionHow did you get involved in the area of data management?Can you describe what Neon is and the story behind it?The ecosystem around Postgres is large and varied. What are the pain points that you are trying to address with Neon? What does it mean for a database to be serverless?What kinds of products and services are unlocked by making Postgres a serverless database?How does your vision for Neon compare/contrast with what you know of PlanetScale?Postgres is known for having a large ecosystem of plugins that add a lot of interesting and useful features, but the storage layer has not been as easily extensible historically. How have architectural changes in recent Postgres releases enabled your work on Neon?What are the core pieces of engineering that you have had to complete to make Neon possible?How have the design and goals of the project evolved since you first started working on it?The separation of storage and compute is one of the most fundamental promises of the cloud. What new capabilities does that enable in Postgres?How does the branching functionality change the ways that development teams are able to deliver and debug features?Because the storage is now a networked system, what new performance/latency challenges does that introduce? How have you addressed them in Neon?Anyone who has ever operated a Postgres instance has had to tackle the upgrade process. How does Neon address that process for end users?The rampant growth of AI has touched almost every aspect of computing, and Postgres is no exception. How does the introduction of pgvector and semantic/similarity search functionality impact the adoption and usage patterns of Postgres/Neon?What new challenges does that introduce for you as an operator and business owner?What are the lessons that you learned from MemSQL/SingleStore that have been most helpful in your work at Neon?What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Neon used?What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Neon?When is Neon the wrong choice? Postgres?What do you have planned for the future of Neon?Contact Info @nikitabase on TwitterLinkedInParting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning.Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected] with your story.Links NeonPostgreSQLNeon GithubPHPMySQLSQL ServerSingleStorePodcast EpisodeAWS AuroraKhosla VenturesYugabyteDBPodcast EpisodeCockroachDBPodcast EpisodePlanetScalePodcast EpisodeClickhousePodcast EpisodeDuckDBPodcast EpisodeWAL == Write-Ahead LogPgBouncerPureStoragePaxos)HNSW IndexIVF Flat IndexRAG == Retrieval Augmented GenerationAlloyDBNeon Serverless DriverDevinmagic.devThe intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Send us a text Part 2 : With Roger Premo, General Manager, Corporate Strategy and Ventures.  We transition from 5 truths on GenAI to 5 truths on Hybrid Cloud.  Everything inquiring minds want to know! 01:40 Hybrid Cloud02:32 Truth #6, ROI on Cloud13:51 #7, Hybrid Multi-cloud is the Norm18:06 Hybrid Landscapes Today20:50 #8, Hybrid is Not Just for Large Enterprises23:17 Multi-cloud Affordability25:40 #9, Open Source Wins32:23 Lock-in34:53 Final #10, Hybrid by Design40:30 Getting Started45:15 Summarizing IT TruthsLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ropremo/ Website: https://www.ibm.com Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple?  Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us why you should be next.  The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun.  Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us why you should be next. The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun.

At Vibrant Planet, we’re on a mission to make the world’s communities and ecosystems more resilient in the face of climate change. Our cloud-based platform is designed for collaborative scenario planning to tackle wildfires, climate threats, and ecosystem restoration on a massive scale. In this talk we will dive into how we are using Airflow. Particularly we will focus on how we’re making Airflow pipelines smarter and more resilient, especially when dealing with the task of processing large satellite imagery and other geospatial data. Self-Healing Pipelines: Discuss our self-healing pipelines which identify likely out-of-memory events and incrementally allocate more memory for task instance retries, ensuring robust and uninterrupted workflow execution. Initial Memory Recommendations: We’ll discuss how we set intelligent initial memory allocations for each task instance, enhancing resource efficiency from the outset.

When developing Machine Learning (ML) models, the biggest challenges are often infrastructural. How do we deploy our model and expose an inference API? How can we retrain? Can we continuously evaluate performance and monitor model drift? In this talk, we will present how we are tackling these problems at the Philadelphia Phillies by developing a suite of tools that enable our software engineering and analytics teams to train, test, evaluate, and deploy ML models - that can be entirely orchestrated in Airflow. This framework abstracts away the infrastructural complexities that productionizing ML Pipelines presents and allows our analysts to focus on developing robust baseball research for baseball operations stakeholders across player evaluation, acquisition, and development. We’ll also look at how we use Airflow, MLflow, MLServer, cloud services, and GitHub Actions to architect a platform that supports our framework for all points of the ML Lifecycle.

This talk is presented by BMC Software With Airflow’s mainstream acceptance in the enterprise, the operational challenges of running with applications in production have emerged. At last year’s Airflow Summit in Toronto, three providers of Apache Airflow met to discuss “The Future of Airflow: What Users Want”. Among the user requirements in the session were: An improved security model allowing “Alice” and “Bob” to run their single DAGs without each requiring a separate Airflow cluster, while still adhering to their organization’s compliance requirements. An “Orchestrator of Orchestrators” relationship in which Airflow oversees the myriad orchestrators embedded in many tools and provided by cloud vendors. That panel discussion described what Airflow users now understand to be mandatory for their workloads in enterprise production, and defined the exact operational requirements our customers have successfully tackled for decades. Join us in this session to learn how Control-M’s Airflow integration helps data engineers do what they need to do with Airflow and gives IT Ops the key to deliver enterprise business application results in production.

Ford Motor Company operates extensively across various nations. The Data Operations (DataOps) team for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) at Ford is tasked with the processing of terabyte-scale daily data from lidar, radar, and video. To manage this, the DataOps team is challenged with orchestrating diverse, compute-intensive pipelines across both on-premises infrastructure and the GCP and deal with sensitive of customer data across both environments The team is also responsible for facilitating the execution of on-demand, compute-intensive algorithms at scale through. To achieve these objectives, the team employs Astronomer/Airflow at the core of its strategic approach. This involves various deployments of Astronomer/Airflow that integrate seamlessly and securely (via Apigee) to initiate batch data processing and ML jobs on the cloud, as well as compute-intensive computer vision tasks on-premises, with essential alerting provided through the ELK stack. This presentation will delve into the architecture and strategic planning surrounding the hybrid batch router, highlighting its pivotal role in promoting rapid innovation and scalability in the development of ADAS features.

Looking for a way to streamline your data workflows and master the art of orchestration? As we navigate the complexities of modern data engineering, Airflow’s dynamic workflow and complex data pipeline dependencies are starting to become more and more common nowadays. In order to empower data engineers to exploit Airflow as the main orchestrator, Airflow Datasets can be easily integrated in your data journey. This session will showcase the Dynamic Workflow orchestration in Airflow and how to manage multi-DAGs dependencies with Multi-Dataset listening. We’ll take you through a real-time data pipeline with Pub/Sub messaging integration and dbt in Google Cloud environment, to ensure data transformations are triggered only upon new data ingestion, moving away from rigid time-based scheduling or the use of sensors and other legacy ways to trigger a DAG.

In the realm of data engineering, machine learning pipelines and using cloud and web services there is a huge demand for orchestration technologies. Apache Airflow belongs to the most popular orchestration technologies or even is the most popular one. In this presentation we are going to focus these aspects of Airflow that make it so popular and whether it became the orchestration industry standard.

This talk will explore ASAPP’s use of Apache Airflow to streamline and optimize our machine learning operations (MLOps). Key highlights include: Integrating with our custom Spark solution for achieving speedup, efficiency, and cost gains for generative AI transcription, summarization and intent categorization pipelines Different design patterns of integrating with efficient LLM servers - like TGI/vllm/tensor-RT for Summarization pipelines with/without Spark. An overview of batched LLM inference using Airflow as opposed to real time inference outside of it [Tentative] Possible extension of this scaffolding to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) for fine-tuning LLMs, using Airflow as the orchestrator. Additionally, the talk will cover ASAPP’s MLOps journey with Airflow over the past few years, including an overview of our cloud infrastructure, various data backends, and sources. The primary focus will be on the machine learning workflows at ASAPP, rather than the data workflows, providing a detailed look at how Airflow enhances our MLOps processes.

This talk is presented by Broadcom. Airflow’s “workflow as code” approach has many benefits, including enabling dynamic pipeline generation and flexibility and extensibility in a seamless development environment. However, what challenges do you face as you expand your Airflow footprint in your organization? What if you could enhance Airflow’s monitoring capabilities, forecast DAG and task executions, obtain predictive alerting, visualize trends, and get more robust logging? Broadcom’s Automation Analytics & Intelligence (AAI) offers advanced analytics for workload automation for cloud and on-premises automation. It connects easily with Airflow to offer improved visibility into dependencies between tasks in Airflow DAGs along with the workload’s critical path, dynamic SLA management, and more. Join our presentation to hear more about how AAI can help you improve service delivery. We will also lead a workshop that will allow you to dive deeper into how easy it is to install our Airflow Connector and get started visualizing your Airflow DAGs to optimize your workload and identify issues before they impact your business.

Airflow is not just purpose-built for data applications. It is a job scheduler on steroids. This is exactly what a cloud platform team needs: a configurable and scalable automation tool that can handle thousands of administrative tasks. Come learn how one enterprise platform team used Airflow to support cloud infrastructure at unprecedented scale.

Apache Airflow is the backbone of countless data pipelines, but optimizing performance and resource utilization can be a challenge. This talk introduces a novel performance testing framework designed to measure, monitor, and improve the efficiency of Airflow deployments. I’ll delve into the framework’s modular architecture, showcasing how it can be tailored to various Airflow setups (Docker, Kubernetes, cloud providers). By measuring key metrics across schedulers, workers, triggers, and databases, this framework provides actionable insights to identify bottlenecks and compare performance across different versions or configurations. Attendees will learn: The motivation behind developing a standardized performance testing approach. Key design considerations and challenges in measuring performance across diverse Airflow environments. How to leverage the framework to construct test suites for different use cases (e.g., version comparison). Practical tips for interpreting performance test results and making informed decisions about resource allocation. How this framework contributes to greater transparency in Airflow release notes, empowering users with performance data.

Explore the evolutionary journey of orchestration within GoDaddy, tracing its transformation from initial on-premise deployment to a robust cloud-based Apache Airflow orchestration model. This session will detail the pivotal shifts in design, organizational decisions, and governance that have streamlined GoDaddy’s Data Platform and enhanced overall governance. Attendees will gain insights valuable for optimizing Airflow deployments and simplifying complex orchestration processes. Recap of the transformation journey and its impact on GoDaddy’s data operations. Future directions and ongoing improvements in orchestration at GoDaddy. This session will benefit attendees by providing a comprehensive case study on optimizing orchestration in a complex enterprise environment, emphasizing practical insights and scalable solutions.

DAG Authors, while constructing DAGs, generally use native libraries provided by Airflow in conjunction with python libraries available over public PyPI repositories. But sometimes, DAG authors need to construct DAG using libraries that are either in-house or not available over public PyPI repositories. This poses a serious challenge for users who want to run their custom code with Airflow DAGs, particularly when Airflow is deployed in a cloud-native fashion. Traditionally, these packages are baked in Airflow Docker images. This won’t work post deployment and is super impractical if your library is under development. We propose a solution that creates a dedicated Airflow global python environment that dynamically generates the requirements, establishes a version-compatible pyenv adhering to Airflow’s policies, and manages custom pip repository authentication seamlessly. Importantly, the service executes these steps in a fail-safe manner, not compromising core components. Join us as we discuss the solution to this common problem, touching upon the design, and seeing the solution in action. We also candidly discuss some challenges, and the shortcomings of the proposed solution.

In today’s data-driven era, ensuring data reliability and enhancing our testing and development capabilities are paramount. Local unit testing has its merits but falls short when dealing with the volume of big data. One major challenge is running Spark jobs pre-deployment to ensure they produce expected results and handle production-level data volumes. In this talk, we will discuss how Autodesk leveraged Astronomer to improve pipeline development. We’ll explore how it addresses challenges with sensitive and large data sets that cannot be transferred to local machines or non-production environments. Additionally, we’ll cover how this approach supports over 10 engineers working simultaneously on different feature branches within the same repo. We will highlight the benefits, such as conflict-free development and testing, and eliminating concerns about data corruption when running DAGs on production Airflow servers. Join me to discover how solutions like Astronomer empower developers to work with increased efficiency and reliability. This talk is perfect for those interested in big data, cloud solutions, and innovative development practices.