Manage Your Unstructured Data Assets Across Cloud And Hybrid Environments With Komprise

Summary

There are a wealth of options for managing structured and textual data, but unstructured binary data assets are not as well supported across the ecosystem. As organizations start to adopt cloud technologies they need a way to manage the distribution, discovery, and collaboration of data across their operating environments. To help solve this complicated challenge Krishna Subramanian and her co-founders at Komprise built a system that allows you to treat use and secure your data wherever it lives, and track copies across environments without requiring manual intervention. In this episode she explains the difficulties that everyone faces as they scale beyond a single operating environment, and how the Komprise platform reduces the burden of managing large and heterogeneous collections of unstructured files.

Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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• Today’s episode is Sponsored by Prophecy.io – the low-code data engineering platform for the cloud. Prophecy provides an easy-to-use visual interface to design & deploy data pipelines on Apache Spark & Apache Airflow. Now all the data users can use software engineering best practices – git, tests and continuous deployment with a simple to use visual designer. How does it work? – You visually design the pipelines, and Prophecy generates clean Spark code with tests on git; then you visually schedule these pipelines on Airflow. You can observe your pipelines with built in metadata search and column level lineage. Finally, if you have existing workflows in AbInitio, Informatica or other ETL formats that you want to move to the cloud, you can import them automatically into Prophecy making them run productively on Spark. Create your free account today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/prophecy.
• So now your modern data stack is set up. How is everyone going to find the data they need, and understand it? Select Star is a data discovery platform that automatically analyzes & documents your data. For every table in Select Star, you can find out where the data originated, which dashboards are built on top of it, who’s using it in the company, and how they’re using it, all the way down to the SQL queries. Best of all, it’s simple to set up, and easy for both engineering and operations teams to use. With Select Star’s data catalog, a single source of truth for your data is built in minutes, even across thousands of datasets. Try it out for free and double the length of your free trial today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/selectstar. You’ll also get a swag package when you continue on a paid plan.
• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Krishna Subramanian about her work at Komprise to generate value from unstructured file and object data across storage formats and locations

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you describe what Komprise is and the story behind it?
• Who are the target customers of the Komprise platform?
  • What are the core use cases that you are focused on supporting?
• How would you characterize the common approaches to managing file storage solutions for hybrid cloud environments?
  • What are some of the shortcomings of the enterprise storage providers’ methods for managing storage tiers when trying to use that data for analytical workloads?
• Given the growth in popularity and capabilities of cloud solutions, how have you approached the strategic positioning of your product to capitalize on the market?
• Can you describe how the Komprise platform is architected?
  • What are some of the most complex considerations that you have had to engineer for when dealing with enterprise data distribution in hybrid cloud environments?
• What are the data replication and consistency guarantees that you are able to offer while spanning across on-premise and cloud systems/block and object storage? (e.g. eventual consistency vs. read-after-write, low latency replication on data changes vs. scheduled syncing, etc.)
• How do you determine and validate the heuristics that you use for understanding how/when to distribute files across storage systems?
• How does the specific workload that you are powering influence the specific operations/capabilities that your customers take advantage of?
• What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen Komprise used?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on Komprise?
• When is Komprise the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of Komprise?

Contact Info

• LinkedIn
• @cloudKrishna 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.
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Links

• Komprise
• Unstruk
  • Podcast Episode
• SMB
• NFS
• S3

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