Summary

With the attention being paid to the systems that power large volumes of high velocity data it is easy to forget about the value of data collection at human scales. Ona is a company that is building technologies to support mobile data collection, analysis of the aggregated information, and user-friendly presentations. In this episode CTO Peter Lubell-Doughtie describes the architecture of the platform, the types of environments and use cases where it is being employed, and the value of small 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. Are you struggling to keep up with customer request and letting errors slip into production? Want to try some of the innovative ideas in this podcast but don’t have time? DataKitchen’s DataOps software allows your team to quickly iterate and deploy pipelines of code, models, and data sets while improving quality. Unlike a patchwork of manual operations, DataKitchen makes your team shine by providing an end to end DataOps solution with minimal programming that uses the tools you love. Join the DataOps movement and sign up for the newsletter at datakitchen.io/de today. After that learn more about why you should be doing DataOps by listening to the Head Chef in the Data Kitchen at dataengineeringpodcast.com/datakitchen Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Peter Lubell-Doughtie about using Ona for collecting data and processing it with Canopy

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What is Ona and how did the company get started?

What are some examples of the types of customers that you work with?

What types of data do you support in your collection platform? What are some of the mechanisms that you use to ensure the accuracy of the data that is being collected by users? Does your mobile collection platform allow for anyone to submit data without having to be associated with a given account or organization? What are some of the integration challenges that are unique to the types of data that get collected by mobile field workers? Can you describe the flow of the data from collection through to analysis? To help improve the utility of the data being collected you have started building Canopy. What was the tipping point where it became worth the time and effort to start that project?

What are the architectural considerations that you factored in when designing it? What have you found to be the most challenging or unexpected aspects of building an enterprise data warehouse for general users?

What are your plans for the future of Ona and Canopy?

Contact Info

Email pld on Github Website

Parting Question

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

Links

OpenSRP Ona Canopy Open Data Kit Earth Institute at Columbia University Sustainable Engineering Lab WHO Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation XLSForms PostGIS Kafka Druid Superset Postgres Ansible Docker Terraform

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

Summary

When working with large volumes of data that you need to access in parallel across multiple instances you need a distributed filesystem that will scale with your workload. Even better is when that same system provides multiple paradigms for interacting with the underlying storage. Ceph is a highly available, highly scalable, and performant system that has support for object storage, block storage, and native filesystem access. In this episode Sage Weil, the creator and lead maintainer of the project, discusses how it got started, how it works, and how you can start using it on your infrastructure today. He also explains where it fits in the current landscape of distributed storage and the plans for future improvements.

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. Are you struggling to keep up with customer request and letting errors slip into production? Want to try some of the innovative ideas in this podcast but don’t have time? DataKitchen’s DataOps software allows your team to quickly iterate and deploy pipelines of code, models, and data sets while improving quality. Unlike a patchwork of manual operations, DataKitchen makes your team shine by providing an end to end DataOps solution with minimal programming that uses the tools you love. Join the DataOps movement and sign up for the newsletter at datakitchen.io/de today. After that learn more about why you should be doing DataOps by listening to the Head Chef in the Data Kitchen at dataengineeringpodcast.com/datakitchen Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Sage Weil about Ceph, an open source distributed file system that supports block storage, object storage, and a file system interface.

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start with an overview of what Ceph is?

What was the motivation for starting the project? What are some of the most common use cases for Ceph?

There are a large variety of distributed file systems. How would you characterize Ceph as it compares to other options (e.g. HDFS, GlusterFS, LionFS, SeaweedFS, etc.)? Given that there is no single point of failure, what mechanisms do you use to mitigate the impact of network partitions?

What mechanisms are available to ensure data integrity across the cluster?

How is Ceph implemented and how has the design evolved over time? What is required to deploy and manage a Ceph cluster?

What are the scaling factors for a cluster? What are the limitations?

How does Ceph handle mixed write workloads with either a high volume of small files or a smaller volume of larger files? In services such as S3 the data is segregated from block storage options like EBS or EFS. Since Ceph provides all of those interfaces in one project is it possible to use each of those interfaces to the same data objects in a Ceph cluster? In what situations would you advise someone against using Ceph? What are some of the most interested, unexpected, or challenging aspects of working with Ceph and the community? What are some of the plans that you have for the future of Ceph?

Contact Info

Email @liewegas on Twitter liewegas on GitHub

Parting Question

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

Links

Ceph Red Hat DreamHo

In this podcast @AndyPalmer from @Tamr sat with @Vishaltx from @AnalyticsWeek to talk about the emergence/need/market for Data Ops, a specialized capability emerging from merging data engineering and dev ops ecosystem due to increased convoluted data silos and complicated processes. Andy shared his journey on what some of the businesses and their leaders are doing wrong and how businesses need to rethink their data silos to future proof themselves. This is a good podcast for any data leader thinking about cracking the code on getting high-quality insights from data.

Timelines: 0:28 Andy's journey. 4:56 What's Tamr? 6:38 What's Andy's role in Tamr. 8:16 What's data ops? 13:07 Right time for business to incorporate data ops. 15:56 Data exhaust vs. data ops. 21:05 Tips for executives in dealing with data. 23:15 Suggestions for businesses working with data. 25:48 Creating buy-in for experimenting with new technologies. 28:47 Using data ops for the acquisition of new companies. 31:58 Data ops vs. dev ops. 36:40 Big opportunities in data science. 39:35 AI and data ops. 44:28 Parameters for a successful start-up. 47:49 What still surprises Andy? 50:19 Andy's success mantra. 52:48 Andy's favorite reads. 54:25 Final remarks.

Andy's Recommended Read: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker https://amzn.to/2Lc6WqK The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu https://amzn.to/2rQyPvp

Andy's BIO: Andy Palmer is a serial entrepreneur who specializes in accelerating the growth of mission-driven startups. Andy has helped found and/or fund more than 50 innovative companies in technology, health care, and the life sciences. Andy’s unique blend of strategic perspective and disciplined tactical execution is suited to environments where uncertainty is the rule rather than the exception. Andy has a specific passion for projects at the intersection of computer science and the life sciences.

Most recently, Andy co-founded Tamr, a next-generation data curation company, and Koa Labs, a start-up club in the heart of Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA.

Specialties: Software, Sales & Marketing, Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture, Drug Discovery, Database, Data Warehouse, Analytics, Startup, Entrepreneurship, Informatics, Enterprise Software, OLTP, Science, Internet, eCommerce, Venture Capital, Bootstrapping, Founding Team, Venture Capital firm, Software companies, early-stage venture, corporate development, venture-backed, venture capital fund, world-class, stage venture capital

About #Podcast:

FutureOfData podcast is a conversation starter to bring leaders, influencers, and lead practitioners to discuss their journey to create the data-driven future.

Podcast link: https://futureofdata.org/emergence-of-dataops-age-andypalmer-futureofdata-podcast/

Wanna Join? If you or any you know wants to join in, Register your interest and email at [email protected]

Want to sponsor? Email us @ [email protected]

Keywords:

FutureOfData #DataAnalytics #Leadership #Podcast #BigData #Strategy

Summary

Data integration and routing is a constantly evolving problem and one that is fraught with edge cases and complicated requirements. The Apache NiFi project models this problem as a collection of data flows that are created through a self-service graphical interface. This framework provides a flexible platform for building a wide variety of integrations that can be managed and scaled easily to fit your particular needs. In this episode project members Kevin Doran and Andy LoPresto discuss the ways that NiFi can be used, how to start using it in your environment, and plans for future development. They also explained how it fits in the broad landscape of data tools, the interesting and challenging aspects of the project, and how to build new extensions.

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. Are you struggling to keep up with customer request and letting errors slip into production? Want to try some of the innovative ideas in this podcast but don’t have time? DataKitchen’s DataOps software allows your team to quickly iterate and deploy pipelines of code, models, and data sets while improving quality. Unlike a patchwork of manual operations, DataKitchen makes your team shine by providing an end to end DataOps solution with minimal programming that uses the tools you love. Join the DataOps movement and sign up for the newsletter at datakitchen.io/de today. After that learn more about why you should be doing DataOps by listening to the Head Chef in the Data Kitchen at dataengineeringpodcast.com/datakitchen 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 Kevin Doran and Andy LoPresto about Apache NiFi

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what NiFi is? What is the motivation for building a GUI as the primary interface for the tool when the current trend is to represent everything as code? How did you get involved with the project?

Where does it sit in the broader landscape of data tools?

Does the data that is processed by NiFi flow through the servers that it is running on (á la Spark/Flink/Kafka), or does it orchestrate actions on other systems (á la Airflow/Oozie)?

How do you manage versioning and backup of data flows, as well as promoting them between environments?

One of the advertised features is tracking provenance for data flows that are managed by NiFi. How is that data collected and managed?

What types of reporting are available across this information?

What are some of the use cases or requirements that lend themselves well to being solved by NiFi?

When is NiFi the wrong choice?

What is involved in deploying and scaling a NiFi installation?

What are some of the system/network parameters that should be considered? What are the scaling limitations?

What have you found to be some of the most interesting, unexpected, and/or challenging aspects of building and maintaining the NiFi project and community? What do you have planned for the future of NiFi?

Contact Info

Kevin Doran

@kevdoran on Twitter Email

Andy LoPresto

@yolopey on Twitter Email

Parting Question

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

Links

NiFi HortonWorks DataFlow HortonWorks Apache Software Foundation Apple CSV XML JSON Perl Python Internet Scale Asset Management Documentum DataFlow NSA (National Security Agency) 24 (TV Show) Technology Transfer Program Agile Software Development Waterfall Spark Flink Kafka Oozie Luigi Airflow FluentD ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) MiNiFi Java C++ Provenance Kubernetes Apache Atlas Data Governance Kibana K-Nearest Neighbors DevOps DSL (Domain Specific Language) NiFi Registry Artifact Repository Nexus NiFi CLI Maven Archetype IoT Docker Backpressure NiFi Wiki TLS (Transport Layer Security) Mozilla TLS Observatory NiFi Flow Design System Data Lineage GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

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

Summary

Data is often messy or incomplete, requiring human intervention to make sense of it before being usable as input to machine learning projects. This is problematic when the volume scales beyond a handful of records. In this episode Dr. Cheryl Martin, Chief Data Scientist for Alegion, discusses the importance of properly labeled information for machine learning and artificial intelligence projects, the systems that they have built to scale the process of incorporating human intelligence in the data preparation process, and the challenges inherent to such an endeavor.

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. Are you struggling to keep up with customer request and letting errors slip into production? Want to try some of the innovative ideas in this podcast but don’t have time? DataKitchen’s DataOps software allows your team to quickly iterate and deploy pipelines of code, models, and data sets while improving quality. Unlike a patchwork of manual operations, DataKitchen makes your team shine by providing an end to end DataOps solution with minimal programming that uses the tools you love. Join the DataOps movement and sign up for the newsletter at datakitchen.io/de today. After that learn more about why you should be doing DataOps by listening to the Head Chef in the Data Kitchen at dataengineeringpodcast.com/datakitchen 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 Cheryl Martin, chief data scientist at Alegion, about data labelling at scale

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? To start, can you explain the problem space that Alegion is targeting and how you operate? When is it necessary to include human intelligence as part of the data lifecycle for ML/AI projects? What are some of the biggest challenges associated with managing human input to data sets intended for machine usage? For someone who is acting as human-intelligence provider as part of the workforce, what does their workflow look like?

What tools and processes do you have in place to ensure the accuracy of their inputs? How do you prevent bad actors from contributing data that would compromise the trained model?

What are the limitations of crowd-sourced data labels?

When is it beneficial to incorporate domain experts in the process?

When doing data collection from various sources, how do you ensure that intellectual property rights are respected? How do you determine the taxonomies to be used for structuring data sets that are collected, labeled or enriched for your customers?

What kinds of metadata do you track and how is that recorded/transmitted?

Do you think that human intelligence will be a necessary piece of ML/AI forever?

Contact Info

LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Links

Alegion University of Texas at Austin Cognitive Science Labeled Data Mechanical Turk Computer Vision Sentiment Analysis Speech Recognition Taxonomy Feature Engineering

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

Summary

Collaboration, distribution, and installation of software projects is largely a solved problem, but the same cannot be said of data. Every data team has a bespoke means of sharing data sets, versioning them, tracking related metadata and changes, and publishing them for use in the software systems that rely on them. The CEO and founder of Quilt Data, Kevin Moore, was sufficiently frustrated by this problem to create a platform that attempts to be the means by which data can be as collaborative and easy to work with as GitHub and your favorite programming language. In this episode he explains how the project came to be, how it works, and the many ways that you can start using it 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. Are you struggling to keep up with customer request and letting errors slip into production? Want to try some of the innovative ideas in this podcast but don’t have time? DataKitchen’s DataOps software allows your team to quickly iterate and deploy pipelines of code, models, and data sets while improving quality. Unlike a patchwork of manual operations, DataKitchen makes your team shine by providing an end to end DataOps solution with minimal programming that uses the tools you love. Join the DataOps movement and sign up for the newsletter at datakitchen.io/de today. After that learn more about why you should be doing DataOps by listening to the Head Chef in the Data Kitchen at dataengineeringpodcast.com/datakitchen 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 Kevin Moore about Quilt Data, a platform and tooling for packaging, distributing, and versioning data

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What is the intended use case for Quilt and how did the project get started? Can you step through a typical workflow of someone using Quilt?

How does that change as you go from a single user to a team of data engineers and data scientists?

Can you describe the elements of what a data package consists of?

What was your criteria for the file formats that you chose?

How is Quilt architected and what have been the most significant changes or evolutions since you first started? How is the data registry implemented?

What are the limitations or edge cases that you have run into? What optimizations have you made to accelerate synchronization of the data to and from the repository?

What are the limitations in terms of data volume, format, or usage? What is your goal with the business that you have built around the project? What are your plans for the future of Quilt?

Contact Info

Email LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Links

Quilt Data GitHub Jobs Reproducible Data Dependencies in Jupyter Reproducible Machine Learning with Jupyter and Quilt Allen Institute: Programmatic Data Access with Quilt Quilt Example: MissingNo Oracle Pandas Jupyter Ycombinator Data.World

Podcast Episode with CTO Bryon Jacob

Kaggle Parquet HDF5 Arrow PySpark Excel Scala Binder Merkle Tree Allen Institute for Cell Science Flask PostGreSQL Docker Airflow Quilt Teams Hive Hive Metastore PrestoDB

Podcast Episode

Netflix Iceberg Kubernetes Helm

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

The data-driven revolution is finally hitting the media and entertainment industry. For decades, broadcast television and print media relied on traditional delivery channels for solvency and growth, but those channels fragmented as cable, streaming, and digital devices stole the show. In this ebook, you’ll learn about the trends, challenges, and opportunities facing players in this industry as they tackle big data, advanced analytics, and DataOps. You’ll explore best practices and lessons learned from three real-world media companies—Sling TV, Turner Broadcasting, and Comcast—as they proceed on their data-driven journeys. Along the way, authors Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma explain how DataOps breaks down silos and connects everyone who handles data, including engineers, data scientists, analysts, and business users. Big-data-as-a-service provider Qubole provides a five-step maturity model that outlines the phases that a company typically goes through when it first encounters big data. Case studies include: Sling TV: this live streaming content platform delivers live TV and on-demand entertainment instantly to a variety of smart televisions, tablets, game consoles, computers, smartphones, and streaming devices Turner Broadcasting System: this Time Warner division recently created the Turner Data Cloud to support direct-to-consumer services, including FilmStruck, Boom (for kids), and NBA League Pass Comcast: the largest broadcasting and cable TV company is building a single integrated big data platform to deliver internet, TV, and voice to more than 28 million customers

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

Many companies are busy collecting massive amounts of data, but few are taking advantage of this treasure horde to build a truly data insights-driven organization. To do so, the data team must democratize both data and the insights in a way that provides real-time access to all employees in the organization. This report explores DataOps, the process, culture, tools, and people required to scale big data pervasively across the enterprise. Just as DevOps has enabled organizations to improve coordination between developers and the operations team, DataOps closely connects everyone who handles data, including engineers, data scientists, analysts, and business users. Democratizing data with this approach requires removing barriers typical of siloed data, teams, and systems. In this report, Apache Hive creators Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma examine the characteristics of a data-driven organization that supports a self-service model. Explore related topics such as data lakes, metadata, cloud architecture, and data-infrastructure-as-a-service Examine conclusions from a survey of more than 400 senior executives whose companies are in various stages of data maturity Learn how data pioneers at Facebook, Uber, LinkedIn, Twitter, and eBay created data-driven cultures and self-service data infrastructures for their organizations

How well prepared is your organization to innovate, using data science? In this report, two leading data scientists at the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton describe ten characteristics of a mature data science capability. After spending years helping clients such as the US government and commercial organizations worldwide build innovative data science capabilities, Peter Guerra and Dr. Kirk Borne identified these characteristics to help you measure your company’s competence in this area. This report provides a detailed discussion of each of the 10 signs of data science maturity, which—among many other things—encourage you to: Give members of your organization access to all your available data Use Agile and leverage "DataOps"—DevOps for data product development Help your data science team sharpen its skills through open or internal competitions Personify data science as a way of doing things, and not a thing to do

See how SymphonyAI Industrial and Microsoft Azure are transforming manufacturing and industrial operations with IRIS Foundry, a powerful Industrial DataOps and AI platform. Learn how organizations can unify and contextualize their data, leverage AI-powered knowledge graphs and the IRIS Copilot, and deploy Unified Namespace (UNS) and Unified Data Models