Balancing Off-the-Shelf and Custom Solutions in Data Engineering

Summary
In this episode of the Data Engineering Podcast Tulika Bhatt, a senior software engineer at Netflix, talks about her experiences with large-scale data processing and the future of data engineering technologies. Tulika shares her journey into the data engineering field, discussing her work at BlackRock and Verizon before joining Netflix, and explains the challenges and innovations involved in managing Netflix's impression data for personalization and user experience. She highlights the importance of balancing off-the-shelf solutions with custom-built systems using technologies like Spark, Flink, and Iceberg, and delves into the complexities of ensuring data quality and observability in high-speed environments, including robust alerting strategies and semantic data auditing.


Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
• Data migrations are brutal. They drag on for months—sometimes years—burning through resources and crushing team morale. Datafold's AI-powered Migration Agent changes all that. Their unique combination of AI code translation and automated data validation has helped companies complete migrations up to 10 times faster than manual approaches. And they're so confident in their solution, they'll actually guarantee your timeline in writing. Ready to turn your year-long migration into weeks? Visit dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold today for the details.
• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Tulika Bhatt about her experiences working on large scale data processing and her insights on the future trajectory of the supporting technologies

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you start by outlining the ways that operating at large scale change the ways that you need to think about the design of data systems?
• When dealing with small-scale data systems it can be feasible to have manual processes. What are the elements of large scal data systems that demand autopmation?
  • How can those large-scale automation principles be down-scaled to the systems that the rest of the world are operating?
• A perennial problem in data engineering is that of data quality. The past 4 years has seen a significant growth in the number of tools and practices available for automating the validation and verification of data. In your experience working with high volume data flows, what are the elements of data validation that are still unsolved?
• Generative AI has taken the world by storm over the past couple years. How has that changed the ways that you approach your daily work?
• What do you see as the future realities of working with data across various axes of large scale, real-time, etc.?
• What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen solutions to large-scale data management designed?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on data management across axes of scale?
• What are the ways that you are thinking about the future trajectory of your work??

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 listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.__init__ covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The AI Engineering Podcast is your guide to the fast-moving world of building AI systems.
• 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.

Links

• BlackRock
• Spark
• Flink
• Kafka
• Cassandra
• RocksDB
• Netflix Maestro workflow orchestrator
• Pagerduty
• Iceberg

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