Summary

With the increased ease of gaining access to servers in data centers across the world has come the need for supporting globally distributed data storage. With the first wave of cloud era databases the ability to replicate information geographically came at the expense of transactions and familiar query languages. To address these shortcomings the engineers at Cockroach Labs have built a globally distributed SQL database with full ACID semantics in Cockroach DB. In this episode Peter Mattis, the co-founder and VP of Engineering at Cockroach Labs, describes the architecture that underlies the database, the challenges they have faced along the way, and the ways that you can use it in your own environments today.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. For complete visibility into the health of your pipeline, including deployment tracking, and powerful alerting driven by machine-learning, DataDog has got you covered. With their monitoring, metrics, and log collection agent, including extensive integrations and distributed tracing, you’ll have everything you need to find and fix performance bottlenecks in no time. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadog today to start your free 14 day trial and get a sweet new T-Shirt. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Peter Mattis about CockroachDB, the SQL database for global cloud services

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What was the motivation for creating CockroachDB and building a business around it? Can you describe the architecture of CockroachDB and how it supports distributed ACID transactions?

What are some of the tradeoffs that are necessary to allow for georeplicated data with distributed transactions? What are some of the problems that you have had to work around in the RAFT protocol to provide reliable operation of the clustering mechanism?

Go is an unconventional language for building a database. What are the pros and cons of that choice? What are some of the common points of confusion that users of CockroachDB have when operating or interacting with it?

What are the edge cases and failure modes that users should be aware of?

I know that your SQL syntax is PostGreSQL compatible, so is it possible to use existing ORMs unmodified with CockroachDB?

What are some examples of extensions that are specific to CockroachDB?

What are some of the most interesting uses of CockroachDB that you have seen? When is CockroachDB the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of CockroachDB?

Contact Info

Peter

LinkedIn petermattis on GitHub @petermattis on Twitter

Cockroach Labs

@CockroackDB on Twitter Website cockroachdb on GitHub

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

CockroachDB Cockroach Labs SQL Google Bigtable Spanner NoSQL RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) “Big Iron” (colloquial term for mainframe computers) RAFT Consensus Algorithm Consensus MVCC (Multiversion Concurrency Control) Isolation Etcd GDPR Golang C++ Garbage Collection Metaprogramming Rust Static Linking Docker Kubernetes CAP Theorem PostGreSQL ORM (Object Relational Mapping) Information Schema PG Catalog Interleaved Tables Vertica Spark Change Data Capture

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandan

Summary

Building an ETL pipeline is a common need across businesses and industries. It’s easy to get one started but difficult to manage as new requirements are added and greater scalability becomes necessary. Rather than duplicating the efforts of other engineers it might be best to use a hosted service to handle the plumbing so that you can focus on the parts that actually matter for your business. In this episode CTO and co-founder of Alooma, Yair Weinberger, explains how the platform addresses the common needs of data collection, manipulation, and storage while allowing for flexible processing. He describes the motivation for starting the company, how their infrastructure is architected, and the challenges of supporting multi-tenancy and a wide variety of integrations.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. For complete visibility into the health of your pipeline, including deployment tracking, and powerful alerting driven by machine-learning, DataDog has got you covered. With their monitoring, metrics, and log collection agent, including extensive integrations and distributed tracing, you’ll have everything you need to find and fix performance bottlenecks in no time. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadog today to start your free 14 day trial and get a sweet new T-Shirt. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Yair Weinberger about Alooma, a company providing data pipelines as a service

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What is Alooma and what is the origin story? How is the Alooma platform architected?

I want to go into stream VS batch here What are the most challenging components to scale?

How do you manage the underlying infrastructure to support your SLA of 5 nines? What are some of the complexities introduced by processing data from multiple customers with various compliance requirements?

How do you sandbox user’s processing code to avoid security exploits?

What are some of the potential pitfalls for automatic schema management in the target database? Given the large number of integrations, how do you maintain the

What are some challenges when creating integrations, isn’t it simply conforming with an external API?

For someone getting started with Alooma what does the workflow look like? What are some of the most challenging aspects of building and maintaining Alooma? What are your plans for the future of Alooma?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @yairwein on Twitter

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

Alooma Convert Media Data Integration ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) Tibco Mulesoft ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Informatica Microsoft SSIS OLAP Cube S3 Azure Cloud Storage Snowflake DB Redshift BigQuery Salesforce Hubspot Zendesk Spark The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data’s unifying abstraction by Jay Kreps RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) SaaS (Software as a Service) Change Data Capture Kafka Storm Google Cloud PubSub Amazon Kinesis Alooma Code Engine Zookeeper Idempotence Kafka Streams Kubernetes SOC2 Jython Docker Python Javascript Ruby Scala PII (Personally Identifiable Information) GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) Amazon EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) Sequoia Capital Lightspeed Investors Redis Aerospike Cassandra MongoDB

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary

Business Intelligence software is often cumbersome and requires specialized knowledge of the tools and data to be able to ask and answer questions about the state of the organization. Metabase is a tool built with the goal of making the act of discovering information and asking questions of an organizations data easy and self-service for non-technical users. In this episode the CEO of Metabase, Sameer Al-Sakran, discusses how and why the project got started, the ways that it can be used to build and share useful reports, some of the useful features planned for future releases, and how to get it set up to start using it in your environment.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. For complete visibility into the health of your pipeline, including deployment tracking, and powerful alerting driven by machine-learning, DataDog has got you covered. With their monitoring, metrics, and log collection agent, including extensive integrations and distributed tracing, you’ll have everything you need to find and fix performance bottlenecks in no time. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadog today to start your free 14 day trial and get a sweet new T-Shirt. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Sameer Al-Sakran about Metabase, a free and open source tool for self service business intelligence

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? The current goal for most companies is to be “data driven”. How would you define that concept?

How does Metabase assist in that endeavor?

What is the ratio of users that take advantage of the GUI query builder as opposed to writing raw SQL?

What level of complexity is possible with the query builder?

What have you found to be the typical use cases for Metabase in the context of an organization? How do you manage scaling for large or complex queries? What was the motivation for using Clojure as the language for implementing Metabase? What is involved in adding support for a new data source? What are the differentiating features of Metabase that would lead someone to choose it for their organization? What have been the most challenging aspects of building and growing Metabase, both from a technical and business perspective? What do you have planned for the future of Metabase?

Contact Info

Sameer

salsakran on GitHub @sameer_alsakran on Twitter LinkedIn

Metabase

Website @metabase on Twitter metabase on GitHub

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

Expa Metabase Blackjet Hadoop Imeem Maslow’s Hierarchy of Data Needs 2 Sided Marketplace Honeycomb Interview Excel Tableau Go-JEK Clojure React Python Scala JVM Redash How To Lie With Data Stripe Braintree Payments

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary

The information about how data is acquired and processed is often as important as the data itself. For this reason metadata management systems are built to track the journey of your business data to aid in analysis, presentation, and compliance. These systems are frequently cumbersome and difficult to maintain, so Octopai was founded to alleviate that burden. In this episode Amnon Drori, CEO and co-founder of Octopai, discusses the business problems he witnessed that led him to starting the company, how their systems are able to provide valuable tools and insights, and the direction that their product will be taking in the future.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 200Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. For complete visibility into the health of your pipeline, including deployment tracking, and powerful alerting driven by machine-learning, DataDog has got you covered. With their monitoring, metrics, and log collection agent, including extensive integrations and distributed tracing, you’ll have everything you need to find and fix performance bottlenecks in no time. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadog today to start your free 14 day trial and get a sweet new T-Shirt. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Amnon Drori about OctopAI and the benefits of metadata management

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What is OctopAI and what was your motivation for founding it? What are some of the types of information that you classify and collect as metadata? Can you talk through the architecture of your platform? What are some of the challenges that are typically faced by metadata management systems? What is involved in deploying your metadata collection agents? Once the metadata has been collected what are some of the ways in which it can be used? What mechanisms do you use to ensure that customer data is segregated?

How do you identify and handle sensitive information during the collection step?

What are some of the most challenging aspects of your technical and business platforms that you have faced? What are some of the plans that you have for OctopAI going forward?

Contact Info

Amnon

LinkedIn @octopai_amnon on Twitter

OctopAI

@OctopaiBI on Twitter Website

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

OctopAI Metadata Metadata Management Data Integrity CRM (Customer Relationship Management) ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Business Intelligence ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Informatica SAP Data Governance SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) Vertica Airflow Luigi Oozie GDPR (General Data Privacy Regulation) Root Cause Analysis

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary

Managing an analytics project can be difficult due to the number of systems involved and the need to ensure that new information can be delivered quickly and reliably. That challenge can be met by adopting practices and principles from lean manufacturing and agile software development, and the cross-functional collaboration, feedback loops, and focus on automation in the DevOps movement. In this episode Christopher Bergh discusses ways that you can start adding reliability and speed to your workflow to deliver results with confidence and consistency.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. For complete visibility into the health of your pipeline, including deployment tracking, and powerful alerting driven by machine-learning, DataDog has got you covered. With their monitoring, metrics, and log collection agent, including extensive integrations and distributed tracing, you’ll have everything you need to find and fix performance bottlenecks in no time. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadog today to start your free 14 day trial and get a sweet new T-Shirt. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Christopher Bergh about DataKitchen and the rise of DataOps

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? How do you define DataOps?

How does it compare to the practices encouraged by the DevOps movement? How does it relate to or influence the role of a data engineer?

How does a DataOps oriented workflow differ from other existing approaches for building data platforms? One of the aspects of DataOps that you call out is the practice of providing multiple environments to provide a platform for testing the various aspects of the analytics workflow in a non-production context. What are some of the techniques that are available for managing data in appropriate volumes across those deployments? The practice of testing logic as code is fairly well understood and has a large set of existing tools. What have you found to be some of the most effective methods for testing data as it flows through a system? One of the practices of DevOps is to create feedback loops that can be used to ensure that business needs are being met. What are the metrics that you track in your platform to define the value that is being created and how the various steps in the workflow are proceeding toward that goal?

In order to keep feedback loops fast it is necessary for tests to run quickly. How do you balance the need for larger quantities of data to be used for verifying scalability/performance against optimizing for cost and speed in non-production environments?

How does the DataKitchen platform simplify the process of operationalizing a data analytics workflow? As the need for rapid iteration and deployment of systems to capture, store, process, and analyze data becomes more prevalent how do you foresee that feeding back into the ways that the landscape of data tools are designed and developed?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @ChrisBergh on Twitter Email

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

DataOps Manifesto DataKitchen 2017: The Year Of DataOps Air Traffic Control Chief Data Officer (CDO) Gartner W. Edwards Deming DevOps Total Quality Management (TQM) Informatica Talend Agile Development Cattle Not Pets IDE (Integrated Devel

Summary

Cloud computing and ubiquitous virtualization have changed the ways that our applications are built and deployed. This new environment requires a new way of tracking and addressing the security of our systems. ThreatStack is a platform that collects all of the data that your servers generate and monitors for unexpected anomalies in behavior that would indicate a breach and notifies you in near-realtime. In this episode ThreatStack’s director of operations, Pete Cheslock, and senior infrastructure security engineer, Patrick Cable, discuss the data infrastructure that supports their platform, how they capture and process the data from client systems, and how that information can be used to keep your systems safe from attackers.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. For complete visibility into the health of your pipeline, including deployment tracking, and powerful alerting driven by machine-learning, DataDog has got you covered. With their monitoring, metrics, and log collection agent, including extensive integrations and distributed tracing, you’ll have everything you need to find and fix performance bottlenecks in no time. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadog today to start your free 14 day trial and get a sweet new T-Shirt. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Pete Cheslock and Pat Cable about the data infrastructure and security controls at ThreatStack

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Why don’t you start by explaining what ThreatStack does?

What was lacking in the existing options (services and self-hosted/open source) that ThreatStack solves for?

Can you describe the type(s) of data that you collect and how it is structured? What is the high level data infrastructure that you use for ingesting, storing, and analyzing your customer data?

How do you ensure a consistent format of the information that you receive? How do you ensure that the various pieces of your platform are deployed using the proper configurations and operating as intended? How much configuration do you provide to the end user in terms of the captured data, such as sampling rate or additional context?

I understand that your original architecture used RabbitMQ as your ingest mechanism, which you then migrated to Kafka. What was your initial motivation for that change?

How much of a benefit has that been in terms of overall complexity and cost (both time and infrastructure)?

How do you ensure the security and provenance of the data that you collect as it traverses your infrastructure? What are some of the most common vulnerabilities that you detect in your client’s infrastructure? For someone who wants to start using ThreatStack, what does the setup process look like? What have you found to be the most challenging aspects of building and managing the data processes in your environment? What are some of the projects that you have planned to improve the capacity or capabilities of your infrastructure?

Contact Info

Pete Cheslock

@petecheslock on Twitter Website petecheslock on GitHub

Patrick Cable

@patcable on Twitter Website patcable on GitHub

ThreatStack

Website @threatstack on Twitter threatstack on GitHub

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

ThreatStack SecDevO

Summary

The data that is used in financial markets is time oriented and multidimensional, which makes it difficult to manage in either relational or timeseries databases. To make this information more manageable the team at Alapaca built a new data store specifically for retrieving and analyzing data generated by trading markets. In this episode Hitoshi Harada, the CTO of Alapaca, and Christopher Ryan, their lead software engineer, explain their motivation for building MarketStore, how it operates, and how it has helped to simplify their development workflows.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. For complete visibility into the health of your pipeline, including deployment tracking, and powerful alerting driven by machine-learning, DataDog has got you covered. With their monitoring, metrics, and log collection agent, including extensive integrations and distributed tracing, you’ll have everything you need to find and fix performance bottlenecks in no time. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadog today to start your free 14 day trial and get a sweet new T-Shirt. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Christopher Ryan and Hitoshi Harada about MarketStore, a storage server for large volumes of financial timeseries data

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What was your motivation for creating MarketStore? What are the characteristics of financial time series data that make it challenging to manage? What are some of the workflows that MarketStore is used for at Alpaca and how were they managed before it was available? With MarketStore’s data coming from multiple third party services, how are you managing to keep the DB up-to-date and in sync with those services?

What is the worst case scenario if there is a total failure in the data store? What guards have you built to prevent such a situation from occurring?

Since MarketStore is used for querying and analyzing data having to do with financial markets and there are potentially large quantities of money being staked on the results of that analysis, how do you ensure that the operations being performed in MarketStore are accurate and repeatable? What were the most challenging aspects of building MarketStore and integrating it into the rest of your systems? Motivation for open sourcing the code? What is the next planned major feature for MarketStore, and what use-case is it aiming to support?

Contact Info

Christopher

Email

Hitoshi

Email

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

MarketStore

GitHub Release Announcement

Alpaca IBM DB2 GreenPlum Algorithmic Trading Backtesting OHLC (Open-High-Low-Close) HDF5 Golang C++ Timeseries Database List InfluxDB JSONRPC Slait CircleCI GDAX

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary

Search is a common requirement for applications of all varieties. Elasticsearch was built to make it easy to include search functionality in projects built in any language. From that foundation, the rest of the Elastic Stack has been built, expanding to many more use cases in the proces. In this episode Philipp Krenn describes the various pieces of the stack, how they fit together, and how you can use them in your infrastructure to store, search, and analyze your data.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. For complete visibility into the health of your pipeline, including deployment tracking, and powerful alerting driven by machine-learning, DataDog has got you covered. With their monitoring, metrics, and log collection agent, including extensive integrations and distributed tracing, you’ll have everything you need to find and fix performance bottlenecks in no time. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadog today to start your free 14 day trial and get a sweet new T-Shirt. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Philipp Krenn about the Elastic Stack and the ways that you can use it in your systems

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? The Elasticsearch product has been around for a long time and is widely known, but can you give a brief overview of the other components that make up the Elastic Stack and how they work together? Beyond the common pattern of using Elasticsearch as a search engine connected to a web application, what are some of the other use cases for the various pieces of the stack? What are the common scaling bottlenecks that users should be aware of when they are dealing with large volumes of data? What do you consider to be the biggest competition to the Elastic Stack as you expand the capabilities and target usage patterns? What are the biggest challenges that you are tackling in the Elastic stack, technical or otherwise? What are the biggest challenges facing Elastic as a company in the near to medium term? Open source as a business model: https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss What is the vision for Elastic and the Elastic Stack going forward and what new features or functionality can we look forward to?

Contact Info

@xeraa on Twitter xeraa on GitHub Website Email

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

Elastic Vienna – Capital of Austria What Is Developer Advocacy? NoSQL MongoDB Elasticsearch Cassandra Neo4J Hazelcast Apache Lucene Logstash Kibana Beats X-Pack ELK Stack Metrics APM (Application Performance Monitoring) GeoJSON Split Brain Elasticsearch Ingest Nodes PacketBeat Elastic Cloud Elasticon Kibana Canvas SwiftType

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary

Buzzfeed needs to be able to understand how its users are interacting with the myriad articles, videos, etc. that they are posting. This lets them produce new content that will continue to be well-received. To surface the insights that they need to grow their business they need a robust data infrastructure to reliably capture all of those interactions. Walter Menendez is a data engineer on their infrastructure team and in this episode he describes how they manage data ingestion from a wide array of sources and create an interface for their data scientists to produce valuable conclusions.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your data pipelines or trying out the tools you hear about on the show. Continuous delivery lets you get new features in front of your users as fast as possible without introducing bugs or breaking production and GoCD is the open source platform made by the people at Thoughtworks who wrote the book about it. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/gocd to download and launch it today. Enterprise add-ons and professional support are available for added peace of mind. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. You can help support the show by checking out the Patreon page which is linked from the site. To help other people find the show you can leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, and tell your friends and co-workers Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Walter Menendez about the data engineering platform at Buzzfeed

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? How is the data engineering team at Buzzfeed structured and what kinds of projects are you responsible for? What are some of the types of data inputs and outputs that you work with at Buzzfeed? Is the core of your system using a real-time streaming approach or is it primarily batch-oriented and what are the business needs that drive that decision? What does the architecture of your data platform look like and what are some of the most significant areas of technical debt? Which platforms and languages are most widely leveraged in your team and what are some of the outliers? What are some of the most significant challenges that you face, both technically and organizationally? What are some of the dead ends that you have run into or failed projects that you have tried? What has been the most successful project that you have completed and how do you measure that success?

Contact Info

@hackwalter on Twitter walterm on GitHub

Links

Data Literacy MIT Media Lab Tumblr Data Capital Data Infrastructure Google Analytics Datadog Python Numpy SciPy NLTK Go Language NSQ Tornado PySpark AWS EMR Redshift Tracking Pixel Google Cloud Don’t try to be google Stop Hiring DevOps Engineers and Start Growing Them

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary

What exactly is data engineering? How has it evolved in recent years and where is it going? How do you get started in the field? In this episode, Maxime Beauchemin joins me to discuss these questions and more.

Transcript provided by CastSource

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. You can help support the show by checking out the Patreon page which is linked from the site. To help other people find the show you can leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, and tell your friends and co-workers Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Maxime Beauchemin

Questions

Introduction How did you get involved in the field of data engineering? How do you define data engineering and how has that changed in recent years? Do you think that the DevOps movement over the past few years has had any impact on the discipline of data engineering? If so, what kinds of cross-over have you seen? For someone who wants to get started in the field of data engineering what are some of the necessary skills? What do you see as the biggest challenges facing data engineers currently? At what scale does it become necessary to differentiate between someone who does data engineering vs data infrastructure and what are the differences in terms of skill set and problem domain? How much analytical knowledge is necessary for a typical data engineer? What are some of the most important considerations when establishing new data sources to ensure that the resulting information is of sufficient quality? You have commented on the fact that data engineering borrows a number of elements from software engineering. Where does the concept of unit testing fit in data management and what are some of the most effective patterns for implementing that practice? How has the work done by data engineers and managers of data infrastructure bled back into mainstream software and systems engineering in terms of tools and best practices? How do you see the role of data engineers evolving in the next few years?

Keep In Touch

@mistercrunch on Twitter mistercrunch on GitHub Medium

Links

Datadog Airflow The Rise of the Data Engineer Druid.io Luigi Apache Beam Samza Hive Data Modeling

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast

There’s an old saying: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” This is true when it comes to migrating workloads to the cloud. Attempting a move without insights into your apps is setting the stage for disaster. How can you ensure your migration to Google Cloud is secure and meets your customers’ expectations? We’ll discuss the role Datadog plays in a migration to Google Cloud. We’ll explore best practices and guide you through the steps to achieve a seamless and successful migration.

This Session is hosted by a Google Cloud Next Sponsor.Visit your registration profile at g.co/cloudnext to opt out of sharing your contact information with the sponsor hosting this session.

This demo showcases Finout’s ability to manage and optimize cloud spend across Azure and services like Kubernetes, Datadog, and OpenAI. It highlights Finout’s unified “MegaBill” view for exploring Azure resources, subscriptions, and tags. The session introduces Virtual Tags for dynamic, rules-based cost allocation and covers shared cost distribution, dashboards, anomaly detection, and alerting—empowering teams to improve Azure cost efficiency.

Whether you're building a chat application, a RAG system, or other AI tools, monitoring remains crucial. We'll show you how Datadog's comprehensive Azure monitoring can help you:

• Get started with PostgresSQL on Azure • Track PostgreSQL performance metrics that matter for GenAI workloads • Create dashboards and alerts that provide meaningful insights