Evolving And Scaling The Data Platform at Yotpo

Summary Building a data platform is an iterative and evolutionary process that requires collaboration with internal stakeholders to ensure that their needs are being met. Yotpo has been on a journey to evolve and scale their data platform to continue serving the needs of their organization as it increases the scale and sophistication of data usage. In this episode Doron Porat and Liran Yogev explain how they arrived at their current architecture, the capabilities that they are optimizing for, and the complex process of identifying and evaluating new components to integrate into their systems. This is an excellent exploration of the decisions and tradeoffs that need to be made while building such a complex system. 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 their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! This episode is brought to you by Acryl Data, the company behind DataHub, the leading developer-friendly data catalog for the modern data stack. Open Source DataHub is running in production at several companies like Peloton, Optum, Udemy, Zynga and others. Acryl Data provides DataHub as an easy to consume SaaS product which has been adopted by several companies. Signup for the SaaS product at dataengineeringpodcast.com/acryl RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their state-of-the-art reverse ETL pipelines enable you to send enriched data to any cloud tool. Sign up free… or just get the free t-shirt for being a listener of the Data Engineering Podcast at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder. The most important piece of any data project is the data itself, which is why it is critical that your data source is high quality. PostHog is your all-in-one product analytics suite including product analysis, user funnels, feature flags, experimentation, and it’s open source so you can host it yourself or let them do it for you! You have full control over your data and their plugin system lets you integrate with all of your other data tools, including data warehouses and SaaS platforms. Give it a try today with their generous free tier at dataengineeringpodcast.com/posthog Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Doron Porat and Liran Yogev about their experiences designing and implementing a self-serve data platform at Yotpo Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Yotpo is and the role that data plays in the organization? What are the core data types and sources that you are working with? What kinds of data assets are being produced and how do those get consumed and re-integrated into the business? What are the user personas that you are supporting and what are the interfaces that they are comfortable interacting with? What is the size of your team and how is it structured? You recently posted about the current architecture of your data platform. What was the starting point on your platform journey? What did the early stages of feature and platform evolution look like? What was the catalyst for making a concerted effort to integrate your systems into a cohesive platform? What was the scope and directive of the project for building a platform? What are the metrics and capabilities that you are optimizing for in the structure of your data platform? What are the organizational or regulatory constraints that you needed to account for? What are some of the early decisions that affected your available choices in later stages of the project? What does the current state of your architecture look like? How long did it take to get to where you are today? What were the factors that you considered in the various build vs. buy decisions? How did you manage cost modeling to understand the true savings on either side of that decision? If you were to start from scratch on a new data platform today what might you do differently? What are the decisions that proved helpful in the later stages of your platform development? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen your platform used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on designing and implementing your platform? What do you have planned for the future of your platform infrastructure? Contact Info Doron LinkedIn Liran 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! 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To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Links Yotpo Data Platform Architecture Blog Post Greenplum Databricks Metorikku Apache Hive CDC == Change Data Capture Debezium Podcast Episode Apache Hudi Podcast Episode Upsolver Podcast Episode Spark PrestoDB Snowflake Podcast Episode Druid Rockset Podcast Episode dbt Podcast Episode Acryl Podcast Episode Atlan Podcast Episode OpenLineage Podcast Episode Okera Shopify Data Warehouse Episode Redshift Delta Lake Podcast Episode Iceberg Podcast Episode Outbox Pattern Backstage Roadie Nomad Kubernetes Deequ Great Expectations Podcast Episode LakeFS Podcast Episode 2021 Recap Episode Monte Carlo The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast