Exploring The Design And Benefits Of The Modern Data Stack
Summary
We have been building platforms and workflows to store, process, and analyze data since the earliest days of computing. Over that time there have been countless architectures, patterns, and "best practices" to make that task manageable. With the growing popularity of cloud services a new pattern has emerged and been dubbed the "Modern Data Stack". In this episode members of the GoDataDriven team, Guillermo Sanchez, Bram Ochsendorf, and Juan Perafan, explain the combinations of services that comprise this architecture, share their experiences working with clients to employ the stack, and the benefits of bringing engineers and business users together with data.
Announcements
- Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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- Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Guillermo Sanchez, Bram Ochsendorf, and Juan Perafan about their experiences with managed services in the modern data stack in their work as consultants at GoDataDriven
Interview
- Introduction
- How did you get involved in the area of data management?
- Can you start by giving your definition of the modern data stack?
- What are the key characteristics of a tool or platform that make it a candidate for the "modern" stack?
- How does the modern data stack shift the responsibilities and capabilities of data professionals and consumers?
- What are some difficulties that you face when working with customers to migrate to these new architectures?
- What are some of the limitations of the components or paradigms of the modern stack?
- What are some strategies that you have devised for addressing those limitations?
- What are some edge cases that you have run up against with specific vendors that you have had to work around?
- What are the "gotchas" that you don’t run up against until you’ve deployed a service and started using it at scale and over time?
- How does data governance get applied across the various services and systems of the modern stack?
- One of the core promises of cloud-based and managed services for data is the ability for data analysts and consumers to self-serve. What kinds of training have you found to be necessary/useful for those end-users?
- What is the role of data engineers in the context of the "modern" stack?
- What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected manifestations of the modern data stack that you have seen?
- What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working with customers to implement a modern data stack?
- When is the modern data stack the wrong choice?
- What new architectures or tools are you keeping an eye on for future client work?
Contact Info
- Guillermo
- Bram
- bramochsendorf on GitHub
- Juan
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.
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Links
- GoDataDriven
- Deloitte
- RPA == Robotic Process Automation
- Analytics Engineer
- James Webb Space Telescope
- Fivetran
- dbt
- Data Governance
- Azure Cloud Platform
- Stitch Data
- Airflow
- Prefect
- Argo Project
- Looker
- Azure Purview
- Soda Data
- Datafold
- Materialize
The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA