Kir Titievsky, Product Manager at Google Cloud with extensive experience in streaming and storage infrastructure, joined Yuliia and Dumky to talk about streaming. Drawing from his work with Apache Kafka, Cloud PubSub, Dataflow and Cloud Storage since 2015, Kir explains the fundamental differences between streaming and micro-batch processing. He challenges common misconceptions about streaming costs, explaining how streaming can be significantly less expensive than batch processing for many use cases. Kir shares insights on the "service bus architecture" revival, discussing how modern distributed messaging systems have solved historic bottlenecks while creating new opportunities for business and performance needs.Kir's medium - https://medium.com/@kir-gcpKir's Linkedin page - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kir-titievsky-%F0%9F%87%BA%F0%9F%87%A6-7775052/

Summary Transactions are a necessary feature for ensuring that a set of actions are all performed as a single unit of work. In streaming systems this is necessary to ensure that a set of messages or transformations are all executed together across different queues. In this episode Denis Rystsov explains how he added support for transactions to the Redpanda streaming engine. He discusses the use cases for transactions, the different strategies, semantics, and guarantees that they might need to support, and how his implementation ended up improving the performance of bulk write operations. This is an interesting deep dive into the internals of a high performance streaming engine and the details that are involved in building distributed systems.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/impact today to save your spot at IMPACT: The Data Observability Summit a half-day virtual event featuring the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, founder of the Data Mesh, Creator of Apache Airflow, and more data pioneers spearheading some of the biggest movements in data. The first 50 to RSVP with this link will be entered to win an Oculus Quest 2 — Advanced All-In-One Virtual Reality Headset. RSVP today – you don’t want to miss it! Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Denis Rystsov about implementing transactions in the RedPanda streaming engine

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you quickly recap what RedPanda is and the goals of the project? What are the use cases for transactions in a pub/sub messaging system?

What are the elements of streaming systems that make atomic transactions a complex problem?

What was the motivation for starting down the path of adding transactions to the RedPanda engine?

How did the constraint of supporting the Kafka API influence your implementation strategy for transaction semantics?

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

Summary

Every business with a website needs some way to keep track of how much traffic they are getting, where it is coming from, and which actions are being taken. The default in most cases is Google Analytics, but this can be limiting when you wish to perform detailed analysis of the captured data. To address this problem, Alex Dean co-founded Snowplow Analytics to build an open source platform that gives you total control of your website traffic data. In this episode he explains how the project and company got started, how the platform is architected, and how you can start using it today to get a clearer view of how your customers are interacting with your web and mobile applications.

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. You work hard to make sure that your data is reliable and accurate, but can you say the same about the deployment of your machine learning models? The Skafos platform from Metis Machine was built to give your data scientists the end-to-end support that they need throughout the machine learning lifecycle. Skafos maximizes interoperability with your existing tools and platforms, and offers real-time insights and the ability to be up and running with cloud-based production scale infrastructure instantaneously. Request a demo at dataengineeringpodcast.com/metis-machine to learn more about how Metis Machine is operationalizing data science. 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 This is your host Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Alexander Dean about Snowplow Analytics

Interview

Introductions How did you get involved in the area of data engineering and data management? What is Snowplow Analytics and what problem were you trying to solve when you started the company? What is unique about customer event data from an ingestion and processing perspective? Challenges with properly matching up data between sources Data collection is one of the more difficult aspects of an analytics pipeline because of the potential for inconsistency or incorrect information. How is the collection portion of the Snowplow stack designed and how do you validate the correctness of the data?

Cleanliness/accuracy

What kinds of metrics should be tracked in an ingestion pipeline and how do you monitor them to ensure that everything is operating properly? Can you describe the overall architecture of the ingest pipeline that Snowplow provides?

How has that architecture evolved from when you first started? What would you do differently if you were to start over today?

Ensuring appropriate use of enrichment sources What have been some of the biggest challenges encountered while building and evolving Snowplow? What are some of the most interesting uses of your platform that you are aware of?

Keep In Touch

Alex

@alexcrdean on Twitter LinkedIn

Snowplow

@snowplowdata on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Links

Snowplow

GitHub

Deloitte Consulting OpenX Hadoop AWS EMR (Elastic Map-Reduce) Business Intelligence Data Warehousing Google Analytics CRM (Customer Relationship Management) S3 GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) Kinesis Kafka Google Cloud Pub-Sub JSON-Schema Iglu IAB Bots And Spiders List Heap Analytics

Podcast Interview

Redshift SnowflakeDB Snowplow Insights Googl

Summary

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

Preamble

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

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact Info

LinkedIn @yairwein on Twitter

Parting Question

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

Links

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

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

Summary

One of the critical components for modern data infrastructure is a scalable and reliable messaging system. Publish-subscribe systems have been popular for many years, and recently stream oriented systems such as Kafka have been rising in prominence. This week Rajan Dhabalia and Matteo Merli discuss the work they have done on Pulsar, which supports both options, in addition to being globally scalable and fast. They explain how Pulsar is architected, how to scale it, and how it fits into your existing infrastructure.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your data pipelines or trying out the tools you hear about on the show. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. You can help support the show by checking out the Patreon page which is linked from the site. To help other people find the show you can leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, and tell your friends and co-workers A few announcements:

There is still time to register for the O’Reilly Strata Conference in San Jose, CA March 5th-8th. Use the link dataengineeringpodcast.com/strata-san-jose to register and save 20% The O’Reilly AI Conference is also coming up. Happening April 29th to the 30th in New York it will give you a solid understanding of the latest breakthroughs and best practices in AI for business. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/aicon-new-york to register and save 20% If you work with data or want to learn more about how the projects you have heard about on the show get used in the real world then join me at the Open Data Science Conference in Boston from May 1st through the 4th. It has become one of the largest events for data scientists, data engineers, and data driven businesses to get together and learn how to be more effective. To save 60% off your tickets go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/odsc-east-2018 and register.

Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Rajan Dhabalia and Matteo Merli about Pulsar, a distributed open source pub-sub messaging system

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what Pulsar is and what the original inspiration for the project was? What have been some of the most challenging aspects of building and promoting Pulsar? For someone who wants to run Pulsar, what are the infrastructure and network requirements that they should be considering and what is involved in deploying the various components? What are the scaling factors for Pulsar and what aspects of deployment and administration should users pay special attention to? What projects or services do you consider to be competitors to Pulsar and what makes it stand out in comparison? The documentation mentions that there is an API layer that provides drop-in compatibility with Kafka. Does that extend to also supporting some of the plugins that have developed on top of Kafka? One of the popular aspects of Kafka is the persistence of the message log, so I’m curious how Pulsar manages long-term storage and reprocessing of messages that have already been acknowledged? When is Pulsar the wrong tool to use? What are some of the improvements or new features that you have planned for the future of Pulsar?

Contact Info

Matteo

merlimat on GitHub @merlimat on Twitter

Rajan

@dhabaliaraj on Twitter rhabalia on GitHub

Parting Question

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

Links

Pulsar Publish-Subscribe Yahoo Streamlio ActiveMQ Kafka Bookkeeper SLA (Service Level Agreement) Write-Ahead Log Ansible Zookeeper Pulsar Deployme