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

How accurate is your data? How accurate is any of our data? If our data is more accurate, will we make better decisions? How MUCH better? Why do the show blurbs of late have so many questions? THAT is a question we can ACCURATELY answer: because the shows grapple with challenging questions! On this episode, Snowplow co-founder Yali Sassoon joined us to chat about the nuts and bolts of data accuracy: the inherent messiness of client-side tracking (but, also, the limitations of server-side tracking), strategies of incrementally improving data accuracy (and the costs therein), and the different types of scenarios where different aspects of data accuracy matter in different ways! Pour yourself a drink (a 2 oz. shot of a fine Scotch will do... which would be 59.1471 ml if you want an accurate and precise metric pour), settle in, and give it a listen! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Summary In recent years the traditional approach to building data warehouses has shifted from transforming records before loading, to transforming them afterwards. As a result, the tooling for those transformations needs to be reimagined. The data build tool (dbt) is designed to bring battle tested engineering practices to your analytics pipelines. By providing an opinionated set of best practices it simplifies collaboration and boosts confidence in your data teams. In this episode Drew Banin, creator of dbt, explains how it got started, how it is designed, and how you can start using it today to create reliable and well-tested reports in your favorite data warehouse.

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, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU 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! Understanding how your customers are using your product is critical for businesses of any size. To make it easier for startups to focus on delivering useful features Segment offers a flexible and reliable data infrastructure for your customer analytics and custom events. You only need to maintain one integration to instrument your code and get a future-proof way to send data to over 250 services with the flip of a switch. Not only does it free up your engineers’ time, it lets your business users decide what data they want where. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/segmentio today to sign up for their startup plan and get $25,000 in Segment credits and $1 million in free software from marketing and analytics companies like AWS, Google, and Intercom. On top of that you’ll get access to Analytics Academy for the educational resources you need to become an expert in data analytics for measuring product-market fit. 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, Dataversity, and the Open Data Science Conference. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more and take advantage of our partner discounts when you register. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch. 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 Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Drew Banin about DBT, the Data Build Tool, a toolkit for building analytics the way that developers build applications

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by explaining what DBT is and your motivation for creating it? Where does it fit in the overall landscape of data tools and the lifecycle of data in an analytics pipeline? Can you talk through the workflow for someone using DBT? One of the useful features of DBT for stability of analytics is the ability to write and execute tests. Can you explain how those are implemented? The packaging capabilities are beneficial for enabling collaboration. Can you talk through how the packaging system is implemented?

Are these packages driven by Fishtown Analytics or the dbt community?

What are the limitations of modeling everything as a SELECT statement? Making SQL code reusable is notoriously difficult. How does the Jinja templating of DBT address this issue and what are the shortcomings?

What are your thoughts on higher level approaches to SQL that compile down to the specific statements?

Can you explain how DBT is implemented and how the design has evolved since you first began working on it? What are some of the features of DBT that are often overlooked which you find particularly useful? What are some of the most interesting/unexpected/innovative ways that you have seen DBT used? What are the additional features that the commercial version of DBT provides? What are some of the most useful or challenging lessons that you have learned in the process of building and maintaining DBT? When is it the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of DBT?

Contact Info

Email @drebanin on Twitter drebanin on GitHub

Parting Question

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

Links

DBT Fishtown Analytics 8Tracks Internet Radio Redshift Magento Stitch Data Fivetran Airflow Business Intelligence Jinja template language BigQuery Snowflake Version Control Git Continuous Integration Test Driven Development Snowplow Analytics

Podcast Episode

dbt-utils We Can Do Better Than SQL blog post from EdgeDB EdgeDB Looker LookML

Podcast Interview

Presto DB

Podcast Interview

Spark SQL Hive Azure SQL Data Warehouse Data Warehouse Data Lake Data Council Conference Slowly Changing Dimensions dbt Archival Mode Analytics Periscope BI dbt docs dbt repository

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

This is a continuation of the stuff Tim Wilson spoke about. I am a relatively new entrant to the whole data science side of things (about 12months in as of now) and tried learning a bit of R / deployed snowplow etc but still struggled with code and not having intuitive interface that I was used to.

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

Have you ever seen a one-man show in the theater? It's awesome. Unless it's terrible. The same can be said for one-person digital analytics teams. It can be awesome, in that you get to, literally, do EVERY aspect of analytics. It can be terrible because, well, you've got to do EVERYTHING, and it's easy for the fun stuff to get squeezed out of the day. On this episode, we head back Down Under for a chat with Moe Kiss, product (and digital) analyst at THE ICONIC. Whether you pronounce "data" as DAY-tuh or DAH-tuh, Moe's perspective will almost certainly motivate you find new ways to push yourself and your organization forward. People, places, things, sites, and doodads mentioned in this episode were many, and they include: R, Tableau, Snowplow, adjust, Datalicious, Moe's post on Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, Moe's post on getting started in digital analytics, Jeffalytics.com, RSiteCatalyst, The Millenial Whoop, Kabaddi, Michael Yates, ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), an Event Tracking Naming Strategy from Chris Le, Simo Ahava, Nico Miceli, and Towards Universal Event Analytics - Building an Event Grammar by Snowplow co-founder Alex Dean.

Somebody wants to overthink their analytics tools? Tell 'em their dreamin'! We wanted to talk about open source and event analytics and Snowplow sits right at that intersection. Our guest Simon Rumble is the co-founder of Snowflake Analytics and one of the longest users of Snowplow. We wrap up the show with all the places you can find Simon and Tim in the next few months. Fun fact: You will also learn in this episode that conversion funnels go down the opposite direction in Australia.