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.

Datadog is a SaaS-based monitoring and analytics platform for cloud-scale infrastructure, applications, logs, and more. Datadog delivers complete visibility into the performance of modern applications in one place through its fully unified platform—which improves cross-team collaboration, accelerates development cycles, and reduces operational and development costs. Try Datadog in your environment with a free 14-day trial—and get a complimentary t-shirt if you install the agent. Go to datadog.com/dataengineeringpodcast to get started!

Your data platform needs to be scalable, fault tolerant, and performant, which means that you need the same from your cloud provider. Linode has been powering production systems for over 17 years, and now they’ve launched a fully managed Kubernetes platform. With the combined power of the Kubernetes engine for flexible and scalable deployments, and features like dedicated CPU instances, GPU instances, and object storage you’ve got everything you need to build a bulletproof data pipeline. If you go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today you’ll even get a $60 credit to use on building your own cluster, or object storage, or reliable backups, or… And while you’re there don’t forget to thank them for being a long-time supporter of the Data Engineering Podcast!



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.

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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

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

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