Summary

Data integration is one of the most challenging aspects of any data platform, especially as the variety of data sources and formats grow. Enterprise organizations feel this acutely due to the silos that occur naturally across business units. The CluedIn team experienced this issue first-hand in their previous roles, leading them to build a business aimed at building a managed data fabric for the enterprise. In this episode Tim Ward, CEO of CluedIn, joins me to explain how their platform is architected, how they manage the task of integrating with third-party platforms, automating entity extraction and master data management, and the work of providing multiple views of the same data for different use cases. I highly recommend listening closely to his explanation of how they manage consistency of the data that they process across different storage backends.

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!
Managing and auditing access to your servers and databases is a problem that grows in difficulty alongside the growth of your teams. If you are tired of wasting your time cobbling together scripts and workarounds to give your developers, data scientists, and managers the permissions that they need then it’s time to talk to our friends at strongDM. They have built an easy to use platform that lets you leverage your company’s single sign on for your data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/strongdm today to find out how you can simplify your systems.
Alluxio is an open source, distributed data orchestration layer that makes it easier to scale your compute and your storage independently. By transparently pulling data from underlying silos, Alluxio unlocks the value of your data and allows for modern computation-intensive workloads to become truly elastic and flexible for the cloud. With Alluxio, companies like Barclays, JD.com, Tencent, and Two Sigma can manage data efficiently, accelerate business analytics, and ease the adoption of any cloud. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/alluxio today to learn more and thank them for their support.
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 Tim Ward about CluedIn, an integration platform for implementing your companies data fabric

Interview

Introduction
How did you get involved in the area of data management?
Before we get started, can you share your definition of what a data fabric is?
Can you explain what CluedIn is and share the story of how it started?
- Can you describe your ideal customer?
- What are some of the primary ways that organizations are using CluedIn?
Can you give an overview of the system architecture that you have built and how it has evolved since you first began building it?
For a new customer of CluedIn, what is involved in the onboarding process?
What are some of the most challenging aspects of data integration?
- What is your approach to managing the process of cleaning the data that you are ingesting?
  - How much domain knowledge from a business or industry perspective do you incorporate during onboarding and ongoing execution?
- How do you preserve and expose data lineage/provenance to your customers?
How do you manage changes or breakage in the interfaces that you use for source or destination systems?
What are some of the signals that you monitor to ensure the continued healthy operation of your platform?
What are some of the most notable customer success stories that you have experienced?
- Are there any notable failures that you have experienced, and if so, what were the lessons learned?
What are some cases where CluedIn is not the right choice?
What do you have planned for the future of CluedIn?

Contact Info

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

Support Data Engineering Podcast

You're Not Walking Around Dressed As A Penis