Vinoo Ganesh

Databricks Sr. Staff Developer Advocate, Denny Lee, Citadel Head of Business Engineering, Vinoo Ganesh, and Databand.ai Co-Founder & CEO, Josh Benamram, discuss the complexities and business necessity of setting clear data service-level agreements (SLAs). They share their experiences around the importance of contractual expectations and why data delivery success criteria are prone to disguise failures as success in spite of our best intentions. Denny, Vinoo, and Josh challenge businesses of all industries to see themselves as data companies by driving home a costly reality – what do businesses have to lose when their data is wrong?

I work at a data-as-a-service (DaaS) company that delivers PBs of geospatial data to customers across a variety of industries. We build and manage a central data lake, housing years of data, and operationalize that data to solve our customers’ problems. I recently gave a talk about the specifics of file formats at Spark+AI Summit 2020 that generated a lot of questions about my company’s migration from CSV to Apache Parquet.

As the data-as-a-service ecosystem continues to evolve, data brokers are faced with an unprecedented challenge – demonstrating the value of their data. Successfully crafting and selling a compelling data product relies on a broker’s ability to differentiate their product from the rest of the market. In smaller or static datasets, measures like row count and cardinality can speak volumes. However, when datasets are in the terabytes or petabytes though – differentiation becomes much difficult.

We’ve all heard the phrase “data is the new oil.” But really imagine a world where this analogy is more real, where problems in the flow of data - delays, low quality, high volatility - could bring down whole economies? When data is the new oil with people and businesses similarly reliant on it, how do you avoid the fires, spills, and crises? As data products become central to companies’ bottom line, data engineering teams need to create higher standards for the availability, completeness, and fidelity of their data.

As the scale of data continues to grow (alongside an ever expanding ecosystem of tools to work with it), developing successful applications is an increasingly challenging proposition—and a necessity. At each stage of the process, from architecting to processing and storing data to deployment, there are a range of aspects to consider. Things like scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. It can be hard to figure out the right way forward.