Summary Data lakes offer a great deal of flexibility and the potential for reduced cost for your analytics, but they also introduce a great deal of complexity. What used to be entirely managed by the database engine is now a composition of multiple systems that need to be properly configured to work in concert. In order to bring the DBA into the new era of data management the team at Upsolver added a SQL interface to their data lake platform. In this episode Upsolver CEO Ori Rafael and CTO Yoni Iny describe how they have grown their platform deliberately to allow for layering SQL on top of a robust foundation for creating and operating a data lake, how to bring more people on board to work with the data being collected, and the unique benefits that a data lake provides. This was an interesting look at the impact that the interface to your data can have on who is empowered to work with it.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management What are the pieces of advice that you wish you had received early in your career of data engineering? If you hand a book to a new data engineer, what wisdom would you add to it? I’m working with O’Reilly on a project to collect the 97 things that every data engineer should know, and I need your help. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/97things to add your voice and share your hard-earned expertise. When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $60 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You listen to this show because you love working with data and want to keep your skills up to date. Machine learning is finding its way into every aspect of the data landscape. Springboard has partnered with us to help you take the next step in your career by offering a scholarship to their Machine Learning Engineering career track program. In this online, project-based course every student is paired with a Machine Learning expert who provides unlimited 1:1 mentorship support throughout the program via video conferences. You’ll build up your portfolio of machine learning projects and gain hands-on experience in writing machine learning algorithms, deploying models into production, and managing the lifecycle of a deep learning prototype. Springboard offers a job guarantee, meaning that you don’t have to pay for the program until you get a job in the space. The Data Engineering Podcast is exclusively offering listeners 20 scholarships of $500 to eligible applicants. It only takes 10 minutes and there’s no obligation. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/springboard and apply today! Make sure to use the code AISPRINGBOARD when you enroll. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ori Rafael and Yoni Iny about building a data lake for the DBA at Upsolver

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by sharing your definition of what a data lake is and what it is comprised of? We talked last in November of 2018. How has the landscape of data lake technologies and adoption changed in that time?

How has Upsolver changed or evolved since we last spoke?

How has the evolution of the underlying technologies impacted your implementation and overall product strategy?

What are some of the common challenges that accompany a data lake implementation? How do those challenges influence the adoption or viability of a data lake? How does the introduction of a universal SQL layer change the staffing requirements for building and maintaining a data lake?

What are the advantages of a data lake over a data warehouse if everything is being managed via SQL anyway?

What are some of the underlying realities of the data systems that power the lake which will eventually need to be understood by the operators of the platform? How is the SQL layer in Upsolver implemented?

What are the most challenging or complex aspects of managing the underlying technologies to provide automated partitioning, indexing, etc.?

What are the main concepts that you need to educate your customers on? What are some of the pitfalls that users should be aware of? What features of your platform are often overlooked or underutilized which you think should be more widely adopted? What have you found to be the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons learned while building the technical and business elements of Upsolver? What do you have planned for the future?

Contact Info

Ori

LinkedIn

Yoni

yoniiny on GitHub LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Links

Upsolver

Podcast Episode

DBA == Database Administrator IDF == Israel Defense Forces Data Lake Eventual Consistency Apache Spark Redshift Spectrum Azure Synapse Analytics SnowflakeDB

Podcast Episode

BigQuery Presto

Podcast Episode

Apache Kafka Cartesian Product kSQLDB

Podcast Episode

Eventador

Podcast Episode

Materialize

Podcast Episode

Common Table Expressions Lambda Architecture Kappa Architecture Apache Flink

Podcast Episode

Reinforcement Learning Cloudformation GDPR

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary Gaining a complete view of the customer journey is especially difficult in B2B companies. This is due to the number of different individuals involved and the myriad ways that they interface with the business. Dreamdata integrates data from the multitude of platforms that are used by these organizations so that they can get a comprehensive view of their customer lifecycle. In this episode Ole Dallerup explains how Dreamdata was started, how their platform is architected, and the challenges inherent to data management in the B2B space. This conversation is a useful look into how data engineering and analytics can have a direct impact on the success of the business.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management What are the pieces of advice that you wish you had received early in your career of data engineering? If you hand a book to a new data engineer, what wisdom would you add to it? I’m working with O’Reilly on a project to collect the 97 things that every data engineer should know, and I need your help. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/97things to add your voice and share your hard-earned expertise. When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You listen to this show because you love working with data and want to keep your skills up to date. Machine learning is finding its way into every aspect of the data landscape. Springboard has partnered with us to help you take the next step in your career by offering a scholarship to their Machine Learning Engineering career track program. In this online, project-based course every student is paired with a Machine Learning expert who provides unlimited 1:1 mentorship support throughout the program via video conferences. You’ll build up your portfolio of machine learning projects and gain hands-on experience in writing machine learning algorithms, deploying models into production, and managing the lifecycle of a deep learning prototype. Springboard offers a job guarantee, meaning that you don’t have to pay for the program until you get a job in the space. The Data Engineering Podcast is exclusively offering listeners 20 scholarships of $500 to eligible applicants. It only takes 10 minutes and there’s no obligation. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/springboard and apply today! Make sure to use the code AISPRINGBOARD when you enroll. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ole Dallerup about Dreamdata, a platform for simplifying data integration for B2B companies

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing what you are building at Dreamata?

What was your inspiration for starting a company and what keeps you motivated?

How do the data requirements differ between B2C and B2B companies? What are the challenges that B2B companies face in gaining visibility across the lifecycle of their customers?

How does that lack of visibility impact the viability or growth potential of the business? What are the factors that contribute to silos in visibility of customer activity within a business?

What are the data sources that you are dealing with to generate meaningful analytics for your customers? What are some of the challenges that business face in either generating or collecting useful informati

Use this guide to one of SQL Server 2019’s most impactful features—Big Data Clusters. You will learn about data virtualization and data lakes for this complete artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) platform within the SQL Server database engine. You will know how to use Big Data Clusters to combine large volumes of streaming data for analysis along with data stored in a traditional database. For example, you can stream large volumes of data from Apache Spark in real time while executing Transact-SQL queries to bring in relevant additional data from your corporate, SQL Server database. Filled with clear examples and use cases, this book provides everything necessary to get started working with Big Data Clusters in SQL Server 2019. You will learn about the architectural foundations that are made up from Kubernetes, Spark, HDFS, and SQL Server on Linux. You then are shown how to configure and deploy Big Data Clusters in on-premises environments or in the cloud. Next, you are taught about querying. You will learn to write queries in Transact-SQL—taking advantage of skills you have honed for years—and with those queries you will be able to examine and analyze data from a wide variety of sources such as Apache Spark. Through the theoretical foundation provided in this book and easy-to-follow example scripts and notebooks, you will be ready to use and unveil the full potential of SQL Server 2019: combining different types of data spread across widely disparate sources into a single view that is useful for business intelligence and machine learning analysis. What You Will Learn Install, manage, and troubleshoot Big Data Clusters in cloud or on-premise environments Analyze large volumes of data directly from SQL Server and/or Apache Spark Manage data stored in HDFS from SQL Server as if it wererelational data Implement advanced analytics solutions through machine learning and AI Expose different data sources as a single logical source using data virtualization Who This Book Is For Data engineers, data scientists, data architects, and database administrators who want to employ data virtualization and big data analytics in their environments

Summary The PostgreSQL database is massively popular due to its flexibility and extensive ecosystem of extensions, but it is still not the first choice for high performance analytics. Swarm64 aims to change that by adding support for advanced hardware capabilities like FPGAs and optimized usage of modern SSDs. In this episode CEO and co-founder Thomas Richter discusses his motivation for creating an extension to optimize Postgres hardware usage, the benefits of running your analytics on the same platform as your application, and how it works under the hood. If you are trying to get more performance out of your database then this episode is for you!

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You monitor your website to make sure that you’re the first to know when something goes wrong, but what about your data? Tidy Data is the DataOps monitoring platform that you’ve been missing. With real time alerts for problems in your databases, ETL pipelines, or data warehouse, and integrations with Slack, Pagerduty, and custom webhooks you can fix the errors before they become a problem. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/tidydata today and get started for free with no credit card required. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Thomas Richter about Swarm64, a PostgreSQL extension to improve parallelism and add support for FPGAs

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what Swarm64 is?

How did the business get started and what keeps you motivated?

What are some of the common bottlenecks that users of postgres run into? What are the use cases and workloads that gain the most benefit from increased parallelism in the database engine? By increasing the processing throughput of the database, how does that impact disk I/O and what are some options for avoiding bottlenecks in the persistence layer? Can you describe how Swarm64 is implemented?

How has the product evolved since you first began working on it?

How has the evolution of postgres impacted your product direction?

What are some of the notable challenges that you have dealt with as a result of upstream changes in postgres?

How has the hardware landscape evolved and how does that affect your prioritization of features and improvements? What are some of the other extensions in the postgres ecosystem that are most commonly used alongside Swarm64?

Which extensions conflict with yours and how does that impact potential adoption?

In addition to your work to optimize performance of the postres engine, you also provide support for using an FPGA as a co-processor. What are the benefits that an FPGA provides over and above a CPU or GPU architecture?

What are the available options for provisioning hardware in a datacenter or the cloud that has access to an FPGA? Most people are familiar with the relevant attributes for selecting a CPU or GPU, what are the specifications that they should be looking at when selecting an FPGA?

For users who are adopting Swarm64, how does it impact the way they should be thinking of their data models? What is involved in migrating an existing database to use Swarm64? What are some of the most interesting, unexpected, or

Summary There have been several generations of platforms for managing streaming data, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and different areas of focus. Pulsar is one of the recent entrants which has quickly gained adoption and an impressive set of capabilities. In this episode Sijie Guo discusses his motivations for spending so much of his time and energy on contributing to the project and growing the community. His most recent endeavor at StreamNative is focused on combining the capabilities of Pulsar with the cloud native movement to make it easier to build and scale real time messaging systems with built in event processing capabilities. This was a great conversation about the strengths of the Pulsar project, how it has evolved in recent years, and some of the innovative ways that it is being used. Pulsar is a well engineered and robust platform for building the core of any system that relies on durable access to easily scalable streams of data.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You monitor your website to make sure that you’re the first to know when something goes wrong, but what about your data? Tidy Data is the DataOps monitoring platform that you’ve been missing. With real time alerts for problems in your databases, ETL pipelines, or data warehouse, and integrations with Slack, Pagerduty, and custom webhooks you can fix the errors before they become a problem. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/tidydata today and get started for free with no credit card required. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Sijie Guo about the current state of the Pulsar framework for stream processing and his experiences building a managed offering for it at StreamNative

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by giving an overview of what Pulsar is?

How did you get involved with the project?

What is Pulsar’s role in the lifecycle of data and where does it fit in the overall ecosystem of data tools? How has the Pulsar project evolved or changed over the past 2 years?

How has the overall state of the ecosystem influenced the direction that Pulsar has taken?

One of the critical elements in the success of a piece of technology is the ecosystem that grows around it. How has the community responded to Pulsar, and what are some of the barriers to adoption?

How are you and other project leaders addressing those barriers?

You were a co-founder at Streamlio, which was built on top of Pulsar, and now you have founded StreamNative to offer Pulsar as a service. What did you learned from your time at Streamlio that has been most helpful in your current endeavor?

How would you characterize your relationship with the project and community in each role?

What motivates you to dedicate so much of your time and enery to Pulsar in particular, and the streaming data ecosystem in general?

Why is streaming data such an important capability? How have projects such as Kafka and Pulsar impacted the broader software and data landscape?

What are some of the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Pulsar used? When is Pulsar the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of S

Summary Data management is hard at any scale, but working in the context of an enterprise organization adds even greater complexity. Infoworks is a platform built to provide a unified set of tooling for managing the full lifecycle of data in large businesses. By reducing the barrier to entry with a graphical interface for defining data transformations and analysis, it makes it easier to bring the domain experts into the process. In this interview co-founder and CTO of Infoworks Amar Arsikere explains the unique challenges faced by enterprise organizations, how the platform is architected to provide the needed flexibility and scale, and how a unified platform for data improves the outcomes of the organizations using it.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Free yourself from maintaining brittle data pipelines that require excessive coding and don’t operationally scale. With the Ascend Unified Data Engineering Platform, you and your team can easily build autonomous data pipelines that dynamically adapt to changes in data, code, and environment — enabling 10x faster build velocity and automated maintenance. On Ascend, data engineers can ingest, build, integrate, run, and govern advanced data pipelines with 95% less code. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/ascend to start building with a free 30-day trial. You’ll partner with a dedicated data engineer at Ascend to help you get started and accelerate your journey from prototype to production. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Amar Arsikere about the Infoworks platform for enterprise data operations and orchestration

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing what you have built at Infoworks and the story of how it got started? What are the fundamental challenges that often plague organizations dealing with "big data"?

How do those challenges change or compound in the context of an enterprise organization? What are some of the unique needs that enterprise organizations have of their data?

What are the design or technical limitations of existing big data technologies that contribute to the overall difficulty of using or integrating them effectively? What are some of the tools or platforms that InfoWorks replaces in the overall data lifecycle?

How do you identify and prioritize the integrations that you build?

How is Infoworks itself architected and how has it evolved since you first built it? Discoverability and reuse of data is one of the biggest challenges facing organizations of all sizes. How do you address that in your platform? What are the roles that use InfoWorks in their day-to-day?

What does the workflow look like for each of those roles?

Can you talk through the overall lifecycle of a unit of data in InfoWorks and the different subsystems that it interacts with at each stage? What are some of the design challenges that you face in building a UI oriented workflow while providing the necessary level of control for these systems?

How do you handle versioning of pipelines and validation of new iterations prior to production release? What are the cases where the no code, graphical paradigm for data orchestration breaks down

Summary Data is a critical element to every role in an organization, which is also what makes managing it so challenging. With so many different opinions about which pieces of information are most important, how it needs to be accessed, and what to do with it, many data projects are doomed to failure. In this episode Chris Bergh explains how taking an agile approach to delivering value can drive down the complexity that grows out of the varied needs of the business. Building a DataOps workflow that incorporates fast delivery of well defined projects, continuous testing, and open lines of communication is a proven path to success.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! If DataOps sounds like the perfect antidote to your pipeline woes, DataKitchen is here to help. DataKitchen’s DataOps Platform automates and coordinates all the people, tools, and environments in your entire data analytics organization – everything from orchestration, testing and monitoring to development and deployment. In no time, you’ll reclaim control of your data pipelines so you can start delivering business value instantly, without errors. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datakitchen today to learn more and thank them for supporting the show! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m welcoming back Chris Bergh to talk about ways that DataOps principles can help to reduce organizational complexity

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? How are typical data and analytic teams organized? What are their roles and structure? Can you start by giving an outline of the ways that complexity can manifest in a data organization?

What are some of the contributing factors that generate this complexity? How does the size or scale of an organization and their data needs impact the segmentation of responsibilities and roles?

How does this organizational complexity play out within a single team? For example between data engineers, data scientists, and production/operations? How do you approach the definition of useful interfaces between different roles or groups within an organization?

What are your thoughts on the relationship between the multivariate complexities of data and analytics workflows and the software trend toward microservices as a means of addressing the challenges of organizational communication patterns in the software lifecycle?

How does this organizational complexity play out between multiple teams? For example between centralized data team and line of business self service teams? Isn’t organizational complexity just ‘the way it is’? Is there any how in getting out of meetings and inter team conflict? What are some of the technical elements that are most impactful in reducing the time to delivery for different roles? What are some strategies that you have found to be useful for maintaining a connection to the business need throughout the different stages of the data lifecycle? What are some of the signs or symptoms of problematic complexity that individuals and organizations should keep an eye out for? What role can automated testing play in improving this process? How do the current set of tools contribute to the fragmentation of data wor

Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2019 is the must-have guide for database professionals eager to leverage the latest advancements in SQL Server 2019. This book covers the features and capabilities that make SQL Server 2019 a powerful tool for managing and analyzing data both on-premises and in the cloud. What this Book will help me do Understand the new features introduced in SQL Server 2019 and their practical applications. Confidently manage and analyze relational, NoSQL, and big data within SQL Server 2019. Implement containerization for SQL Server using Docker and Kubernetes. Migrate and integrate your databases effectively to use Power BI Report Server. Query data from Hadoop Distributed File System with Azure Data Studio. Author(s) The authors of 'Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2019' are subject matter experts including Kellyn Gorman, Allan Hirt, and others. With years of professional experience in database management and SQL Server, they bring a wealth of practical insight and knowledge to the book. Their experience spans roles as administrators, architects, and educators in the field. Who is it for? This book is aimed at database professionals such as DBAs, architects, and big data engineers who are currently using earlier versions of SQL Server or other database platforms. It is particularly well-suited for professionals aiming to understand and implement SQL Server 2019's new features. Readers should have basic familiarity with SQL Server and RDBMS concepts. If you're looking to explore SQL Server 2019 to improve data management and analytics in your organization, this book is for you.

Summary Modern applications frequently require access to real-time data, but building and maintaining the systems that make that possible is a complex and time consuming endeavor. Eventador is a managed platform designed to let you focus on using the data that you collect, without worrying about how to make it reliable. In this episode Eventador Founder and CEO Kenny Gorman describes how the platform is architected, the challenges inherent to managing reliable streams of data, the simplicity offered by a SQL interface, and the interesting projects that his customers have built on top of it. This was an interesting inside look at building a business on top of open source stream processing frameworks and how to reduce the burden on end users.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Kenny Gorman about the Eventador streaming SQL platform

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing what the Eventador platform is and the story behind it?

How has your experience at ObjectRocket influenced your approach to streaming SQL? How do the capabilities and developer experience of Eventador compare to other streaming SQL engines such as ksqlDB, Pulsar SQL, or Materialize?

What are the main use cases that you are seeing people use for streaming SQL?

How does it fit into an application architecture? What are some of the design changes in the different layers that are necessary to take advantage of the real time capabilities?

Can you describe how the Eventador platform is architected?

How has the system design evolved since you first began working on it? How has the overall landscape of streaming systems changed since you first began working on Eventador? If you were to start over today what would you do differently?

What are some of the most interesting and challenging operational aspects of running your platform? What are some of the ways that you have modified or augmented the SQL dialect that you support?

What is the tipping point for when SQL is insufficient for a given task and a user might want to leverage Flink?

What is the workflow for developing and deploying different SQL jobs?

How do you handle versioning of the queries and integration with the software development lifecycle?

What are some data modeling considerations that users should be aware of?

What are some of the sharp edges or design pitfalls that users should be aware of?

What are some of the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen your customers use your platform? What are some of the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned in the process of building and scaling Eventador? What do you have planned for the future of the platform?

Contact Info

LinkedIn Blog @kennygorman on Twitter kgorman on Twitter

Parting 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 show, Podcast.init to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. Visit t

Summary The software applications that we build for our businesses are a rich source of data, but accessing and extracting that data is often a slow and error-prone process. Rookout has built a platform to separate the data collection process from the lifecycle of your code. In this episode, CTO Liran Haimovitch discusses the benefits of shortening the iteration cycle and bringing non-engineers into the process of identifying useful data. This was a great conversation about the importance of democratizing the work of data collection.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Liran Haimovitch, CTO of Rookout, about the business value of operations metrics and other dark data in your organization

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing the types of data that we typically collect for the systems operations context?

What are some of the business questions that can be answered from these data sources?

What are some of the considerations that developers and operations engineers need to be aware of when they are defining the collection points for system metrics and log messages?

What are some effective strategies that you have found for including business stake holders in the process of defining these collection points?

One of the difficulties in building useful analyses from any source of data is maintaining the appropriate context. What are some of the necessary metadata that should be maintained along with operational metrics?

What are some of the shortcomings in the systems we design and use for operational data stores in terms of making the collected data useful for other purposes?

How does the existing tooling need to be changed or augmented to simplify the collaboration between engineers and stake holders for defining and collecting the needed information? The types of systems that we use for collecting and analyzing operations metrics are often designed and optimized for different access patterns and data formats than those used for analytical and exploratory purposes. What are your thoughts on how to incorporate the collected metrics with behavioral data? What are some of the other sources of dark data that we should keep an eye out for in our organizations?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @Liran_Last on Twitter

Parting 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 show, Podcast.init to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. 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. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat

Links

Rookout Cybersecurity DevOps DataDog Graphite Elasticsearch Logz.io Kafka

The intro and o

IBM® Spectrum Scale is a proven, scalable, high-performance data and file management solution. It provides world-class storage management with extreme scalability, flash accelerated performance, automatic policy-based storage that has tiers of flash through disk to tape. It also provides support for various protocols, such as NFS, SMB, Object, HDFS, and iSCSI. Containers can leverage the performance, information lifecycle management (ILM), scalability, and multisite data management to give the full flexibility on storage as they experience on the runtime. Container adoption is increasing in all industries, and they sprawl across multiple nodes on a cluster. The effective management of containers is necessary because their number will probably reach a far greater number than virtual machines today. Kubernetes is the standard container management platform currently being used. Data management is of ultimate importance, and often is forgotten because the first workloads containerized are ephemeral. For data management, many drivers with different specifications were available. A specification named Container Storage Interface (CSI) was created and is now adopted by all major Container Orchestrator Systems available. Although other container orchestration systems exist, Kubernetes became the standard framework for container management. It is a very flexible open source platform used as the base for most cloud providers and software companies' container orchestration systems. Red Hat OpenShift is one of the most reliable enterprise-grade container orchestration systems based on Kubernetes, designed and optimized to easily deploy web applications and services. OpenShift enables developers to focus on the code, while the platform takes care of all of the complex IT operations and processes. This IBM Redbooks® publication describes how the CSI Driver for IBM file storage enables IBM Spectrum® Scale to be used as persistent storage for stateful applications running in Kubernetes clusters. Through the Container Storage Interface Driver for IBM file storage, Kubernetes persistent volumes (PVs) can be provisioned from IBM Spectrum Scale. Therefore, the containers can be used with stateful microservices, such as database applications (MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and so on).

Summary Knowledge graphs are a data resource that can answer questions beyond the scope of traditional data analytics. By organizing and storing data to emphasize the relationship between entities, we can discover the complex connections between multiple sources of information. In this episode John Maiden talks about how Cherre builds knowledge graphs that provide powerful insights for their customers and the engineering challenges of building a scalable graph. If you’re wondering how to extract additional business value from existing data, this episode will provide a way to expand your data resources.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on great conferences. We have partnered with organizations such as ODSC, and Data Council. Upcoming events include ODSC East which has gone virtual starting April 16th. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing John Maiden about how Cherre is building and using a knowledge graph of commercial real estate information

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing what Cherre is and the role that data plays in the business? What are the benefits of a knowledge graph for making real estate investment decisions? What are the main ways that you and your customers are using the knowledge graph?

What are some of the challenges that you face in providing a usable interface for end-users to query the graph?

What technology are you using for storing and processing the graph?

What challenges do you face in scaling the complexity and analysis of the graph?

What are the main sources of data for the knowledge graph? What are some of the ways that messiness manifests in the data that you are using to populate the graph?

How are you managing cleaning of the data and how do you identify and process records that can’t be coerced into the desired structure? How do you handle missing attributes or extra attributes in a given record?

How did you approach the process of determining an effective taxonomy for records in the graph? What is involved in performing entity extraction on your data? What are some of the most interesting or unexpected questions that you have been able to ask and answer with the graph? What are some of the most interesting/unexpected/challenging lessons that you have learned in the process of working with this data? What are some of the near and medium term improvements that you have planned for your knowledge graph? What advice do you have for anyone who is interested in building a knowledge graph of their own?

Contact Info

LinkedIn

Parting Question

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

Closing Announcements

Thank you for liste

Summary Building and maintaining a system that integrates and analyzes all of the data for your organization is a complex endeavor. Operating on a shoe-string budget makes it even more challenging. In this episode Tyler Colby shares his experiences working as a data professional in the non-profit sector. From managing Salesforce data models to wrangling a multitude of data sources and compliance challenges, he describes the biggest challenges that he is facing.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on great conferences. We have partnered with organizations such as ODSC, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the Observe 20/20 virtual conference and ODSC East which has also gone virtual. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Tyler Colby about his experiences working as a data professional in the non-profit arena, most recently at the Natural Resources Defense Council

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing your responsibilities as the director of data infrastructure at the NRDC? What specific challenges are you facing at the NRDC? Can you describe some of the types of data that you are working with at the NRDC?

What types of systems are you relying on for the source of your data?

What kinds of systems have you put in place to manage the data needs of the NRDC?

What are your biggest influences in the build vs. buy decisions that you make? What heuristics or guidelines do you rely on for aligning your work with the business value that it will produce and the broader mission of the organization?

Have you found there to be any extra scrutiny of your work as a member of a non-profit in terms of regulations or compliance questions? Your career has involved a significant focus on the Salesforce platform. For anyone not familiar with it, what benefits does it provide in managing information flows and analysis capabilities?

What are some of the most challenging or complex aspects of working with Saleseforce?

In light of the current global crisis posed by COVID-19 you have established a new non-profit entity to organize the efforts of various technical professionals. Can you describe the nature of that mission?

What are some of the unique data challenges that you anticipate or have already encountered? How do the data challenges of this new organization compare to your past experiences?

What have you found to be most useful or beneficial in the current landscape of data management systems and practices in your career with non-profit organizations?

What are the areas that need to be addressed or improved for workers in the non-profit sector?

Contact Info

LinkedIn

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap

For decades, businesses have used information about their customers to make critical decisions on what to stock in inventory, which items to recommend to customers, and when to run promotions. But the advent of big data early in this century changed the game considerably. The key to achieving a competitive advantage today is the ability to process and store ever-increasing amounts of information that affect those decisions. In this report, solutions specialists from Red Hat provide an architectural guide to help you navigate the modern data analytics ecosystem. You’ll learn how the industry has evolved and examine current approaches to storage. That includes a deep dive into the anatomy of a portable data platform architecture, along with several aspects of running data pipelines and intelligent applications with Kubernetes. Explore the history of open source data processing and the evolution of container scheduling Get a concise overview of intelligent applications Learn how to use storage with Kubernetes to produce effective intelligent applications Understand how to structure applications on Kubernetes in your platform architecture Delve into example pipeline architectures for deploying intelligent applications on Kubernetes

Summary There are a number of platforms available for object storage, including self-managed open source projects. But what goes on behind the scenes of the companies that run these systems at scale so you don’t have to? In this episode Will Smith shares the journey that he and his team at Linode recently completed to bring a fast and reliable S3 compatible object storage to production for your benefit. He discusses the challenges of running object storage for public usage, some of the interesting ways that it was stress tested internally, and the lessons that he learned along the way.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Corinium Global Intelligence, ODSC, and Data Council. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Will Smith about his work on building object storage for the Linode cloud platform

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by giving an overview of the current state of your object storage product?

What was the motivating factor for building and managing your own object storage system rather than building an integration with another offering such as Wasabi or Backblaze?

What is the scale and scope of usage that you had to design for? Can you describe how your platform is implemented?

What was your criteria for deciding whether to use an available platform such as Ceph or MinIO vs building your own from scratch? How have your initial assumptions about the operability and maintainability of your installation been challenged or updated since it has been released to the public?

What have been the biggest challenges that you have faced in designing and deploying a system that can meet the scale and reliability requirements of Linode? What are the most important capabilities for the underlying hardware that you are running on? What supporting systems and tools are you using to manage the availability and durability of your object storage? How did you approach the rollout of Linode’s object storage to gain the confidence that you needed to feel comfortable with full scale usage? What are some of the benefits that you have gained internally at Linode from having an object storage system available to your product teams? What are your thoughts on the state of the S3 API as a de facto standard for object storage? What is your main focus now that object storage is being rolled out to more data centers?

Contact Info

Dorthu on GitHub dorthu22 on Twitter LinkedIn Website

Parting Question

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

Links

Linode Object Storage Xen Hypervisor KVM (Linux K

Summary CouchDB is a distributed document database built for scale and ease of operation. With a built-in synchronization protocol and a HTTP interface it has become popular as a backend for web and mobile applications. Created 15 years ago, it has accrued some technical debt which is being addressed with a refactored architecture based on FoundationDB. In this episode Adam Kocoloski shares the history of the project, how it works under the hood, and how the new design will improve the project for our new era of computation. This was an interesting conversation about the challenges of maintaining a large and mission critical project and the work being done to evolve it.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Are you spending too much time maintaining your data pipeline? Snowplow empowers your business with a real-time event data pipeline running in your own cloud account without the hassle of maintenance. Snowplow takes care of everything from installing your pipeline in a couple of hours to upgrading and autoscaling so you can focus on your exciting data projects. Your team will get the most complete, accurate and ready-to-use behavioral web and mobile data, delivered into your data warehouse, data lake and real-time streams. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/snowplow today to find out why more than 600,000 websites run Snowplow. Set up a demo and mention you’re a listener for a special offer! Setting up and managing a data warehouse for your business analytics is a huge task. Integrating real-time data makes it even more challenging, but the insights you obtain can make or break your business growth. You deserve a data warehouse engine that outperforms the demands of your customers and simplifies your operations at a fraction of the time and cost that you might expect. You deserve ClickHouse, the open-source analytical database that deploys and scales wherever and whenever you want it to and turns data into actionable insights. And Altinity, the leading software and service provider for ClickHouse, is on a mission to help data engineers and DevOps managers tame their operational analytics. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/altinity for a free consultation to find out how they can help you today. You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Corinium Global Intelligence, ODSC, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the Software Architecture Conference in NYC, Strata Data in San Jose, and PyCon US in Pittsburgh. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Adam Kocoloski about CouchDB and the work being done to migrate the storage layer to FoundationDB

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you starty by describing what CouchDB is?

How did you get involved in the CouchDB project and what is your current role in the community?

What are the use cases that it is well suited for? Can you share some of the history of CouchDB and its role in the NoSQL movement? How is CouchDB currently architected and how has it evolved since it was first introduced? What have been the benefits and challenges of Erlang as the runtime for CouchDB? How is the current storage engine implemented and what are its shortcomings? What problems are you trying to solve by replatforming on a new storage layer?

What were the selection criteria for the new storage engine and how did you structure the decision making process? What was the motivation for choosing FoundationDB as opposed to other options such as rocksDB, levelDB, etc.?

How is the adoption of FoundationDB going to impact the overall architecture and implementation of CouchDB? How will the use of FoundationDB impact the way that the current capabilities are implemented, such as data replication? What will the migration path be for people running an existing installation? What are some of the biggest challenges that you are facing in rearchitecting the codebase? What new capabilities will the FoundationDB storage layer enable? What are some of the most interesting/unexpected/innovative ways that you have seen CouchDB used?

What new capabilities or use cases do you anticipate once this migration is complete?

What are some of the most interesting/unexpected/challenging lessons that you have learned while working with the CouchDB project and community? What is in store for the future of CouchDB?

Contact Info

LinkedIn @kocolosk on Twitter kocolosk on GitHub

Parting Question

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

Links

Apache CouchDB FoundationDB

Podcast Episode

IBM Cloudant Experimental Particle Physics FPGA == Field Programmable Gate Array Apache Software Foundation CRDT == Conflict-free Replicated Data Type

Podcast Episode

Erlang Riak RabbitMQ Heisenbug Kubernetes Property Based Testing

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

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Summary Data governance is a complex endeavor, but scaling it to meet the needs of a complex or globally distributed organization requires a well considered and coherent strategy. In this episode Tim Ward describes an architecture that he has used successfully with multiple organizations to scale compliance. By treating it as a graph problem, where each hub in the network has localized control with inheritance of higher level controls it reduces overhead and provides greater flexibility. Tim provides useful examples for understanding how to adopt this approach in your own organization, including some technology recommendations for making it maintainable and scalable. If you are struggling to scale data quality controls and governance requirements then this interview will provide some useful ideas to incorporate into your roadmap.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Corinium Global Intelligence, ODSC, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the Software Architecture Conference in NYC, Strata Data in San Jose, and PyCon US in Pittsburgh. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Tim Ward about using an architectural pattern called data hub that allows for scaling data management across global businesses

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by giving an overview of the goals of a data hub architecture? What are the elements of a data hub architecture and how do they contribute to the overall goals?

What are some of the patterns or reference architectures that you drew on to develop this approach?

What are some signs that an organization should implement a data hub architecture? What is the migration path for an organization who has an existing data platform but needs to scale their governance and localize storage and access? What are the features or attributes of an individual hub that allow for them to be interconnected?

What is the interface presented between hubs to allow for accessing information across these localized repositories?

What is the process for adding a new hub and making it discoverable across the organization? How is discoverability of data managed within and between hubs? If someone wishes to access information between hubs or across several of them, how do you prevent data proliferation?

If data is copied between hubs, how are record updates accounted for to ensure that they are replicated to the hubs that hold a copy of that entity? How are access controls and data masking managed to ensure that various compliance regimes are honored? In addition to compliance issues, another challenge of distributed data repositories is the

Summary Building applications on top of unbounded event streams is a complex endeavor, requiring careful integration of multiple disparate systems that were engineered in isolation. The ksqlDB project was created to address this state of affairs by building a unified layer on top of the Kafka ecosystem for stream processing. Developers can work with the SQL constructs that they are familiar with while automatically getting the durability and reliability that Kafka offers. In this episode Michael Drogalis, product manager for ksqlDB at Confluent, explains how the system is implemented, how you can use it for building your own stream processing applications, and how it fits into the lifecycle of your data infrastructure. If you have been struggling with building services on low level streaming interfaces then give this episode a listen and try it out for yourself.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Are you spending too much time maintaining your data pipeline? Snowplow empowers your business with a real-time event data pipeline running in your own cloud account without the hassle of maintenance. Snowplow takes care of everything from installing your pipeline in a couple of hours to upgrading and autoscaling so you can focus on your exciting data projects. Your team will get the most complete, accurate and ready-to-use behavioral web and mobile data, delivered into your data warehouse, data lake and real-time streams. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/snowplow today to find out why more than 600,000 websites run Snowplow. Set up a demo and mention you’re a listener for a special offer! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Corinium Global Intelligence, ODSC, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the Software Architecture Conference in NYC, Strata Data in San Jose, and PyCon US in Pittsburgh. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Michael Drogalis about ksqlDB, the open source streaming database layer for Kafka

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing what ksqlDB is? What are some of the use cases that it is designed for? How do the capabilities and design of ksqlDB compare to other solutions for querying streaming data with SQL such as Pulsar SQL, PipelineDB, or Materialize? What was the motivation for building a unified project for providing a database interface on the data stored in Kafka? How is ksqlDB architected?

If you were to rebuild the entire platform and its components from scratch today, what would you do differently?

What is the workflow for an analyst or engineer to design and build an application on top of ksqlDB?

What dialect of SQL is supported?

What ki

Summary Misaligned priorities across business units can lead to tensions that drive members of the organization to build data and analytics projects without the guidance or support of engineering or IT staff. The availability of cloud platforms and managed services makes this a viable option, but can lead to downstream challenges. In this episode Sean Knapp and Charlie Crocker share their experiences of working in and with companies that have dealt with shadow IT projects and the importance of enabling and empowering the use and exploration of data and analytics. If you have ever been frustrated by seemingly draconian policies or struggled to align everyone on your supported platform, then this episode will help you gain some perspective and set you on a path to productive collaboration.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Are you spending too much time maintaining your data pipeline? Snowplow empowers your business with a real-time event data pipeline running in your own cloud account without the hassle of maintenance. Snowplow takes care of everything from installing your pipeline in a couple of hours to upgrading and autoscaling so you can focus on your exciting data projects. Your team will get the most complete, accurate and ready-to-use behavioral web and mobile data, delivered into your data warehouse, data lake and real-time streams. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/snowplow today to find out why more than 600,000 websites run Snowplow. Set up a demo and mention you’re a listener for a special offer! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Corinium Global Intelligence, ODSC, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the Software Architecture Conference in NYC, Strata Data in San Jose, and PyCon US in Pittsburgh. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Sean Knapp, Charlie Crocker about shadow IT in data and analytics

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by sharing your definition of shadow IT? What are some of the reasons that members of an organization might start building their own solutions outside of what is supported by the engineering teams?

What are some of the roles in an organization that you have seen involved in these shadow IT projects?

What kinds of tools or platforms are well suited for being provisioned and managed without involvement from the platform team?

What are some of the pitfalls that these solutions present as a result of their initial ease of use?

What are the benefits to the organization of individuals or teams building and managing their own solutions? What are some of the risks associated with these implementations of data collection, storage, man

Summary One of the biggest challenges in building reliable platforms for processing event pipelines is managing the underlying infrastructure. At Snowplow Analytics the complexity is compounded by the need to manage multiple instances of their platform across customer environments. In this episode Josh Beemster, the technical operations lead at Snowplow, explains how they manage automation, deployment, monitoring, scaling, and maintenance of their streaming analytics pipeline for event data. He also shares the challenges they face in supporting multiple cloud environments and the need to integrate with existing customer systems. If you are daunted by the needs of your data infrastructure then it’s worth listening to how Josh and his team are approaching the problem.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, a 40Gbit public network, fast object storage, and a brand new managed Kubernetes platform, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. And for your machine learning workloads, they’ve got dedicated CPU and GPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Corinium Global Intelligence, ODSC, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the Software Architecture Conference in NYC, Strata Data in San Jose, and PyCon US in Pittsburgh. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Josh Beemster about how Snowplow manages deployment and maintenance of their managed service in their customer’s cloud accounts.

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by giving an overview of the components in your system architecture and the nature of your managed service? What are some of the challenges that are inherent to private SaaS nature of your managed service? What elements of your system require the most attention and maintenance to keep them running properly? Which components in the pipeline are most subject to variability in traffic or resource pressure and what do you do to ensure proper capacity? How do you manage deployment of the full Snowplow pipeline for your customers?

How has your strategy for deployment evolved since you first began Soffering the managed service? How has the architecture of the pipeline evolved to simplify operations?

How much customization do you allow for in the event that the customer has their own system that they want to use in place of one of your supported components?

What are some of the common difficulties that you encounter when working with customers who need customized components, topologies, or event flows?

How does that reflect in the tooling that you use to manage their deployments?

What types of metrics do you track and what do you use for monitoring and alerting to ensure that your customers pipelines are running smoothly? What are some of the most interesting/unexpected/challenging lessons that you have learned in the process of working with and on Snowplow? What are some lessons that you can generalize for management of data infrastructure more broadly? If you could start over with all of Snowplow and the infrastructure automation for it today, what would you do differently? What do you have planned for the future of the Snowplow product and infrastructure management?

Contact Info

LinkedIn jbeemster on GitHub @jbeemster1 on Twitter

Parting 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 show, Podcast.init to learn about the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. 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. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat

Links

Snowplow Analytics

Podcast Episode

Terraform Consul Nomad Meltdown Vulnerability Spectre Vulnerability AWS Kinesis Elasticsearch SnowflakeDB Indicative S3 Segment AWS Cloudwatch Stackdriver Apache Kafka Apache Pulsar Google Cloud PubSub AWS SQS AWS SNS AWS Redshift Ansible AWS Cloudformation Kubernetes AWS EMR

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

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