Alternatives to Astronomer

Data science and engineering teams at Lyft maintain several big data pipelines that serve as the foundation for various types of analysis throughout the business.

Apache Airflow sits at the center of this big data infrastructure, allowing users to “programmatically author, schedule, and monitor data pipelines.” Airflow is an open source tool, and “Lyft is the very first Airflow adopter in production since the project was open sourced around three years ago.”

There are several key components of the architecture. A web UI allows users to view the status of their queries, along with an audit trail of any modifications the query. A metadata database stores things like job status and task instance status. A multi-process scheduler handles job requests, and triggers the executor to execute those tasks.

Airflow supports several executors, though Lyft uses CeleryExecutor to scale task execution in production. Airflow is deployed to three Amazon Auto Scaling Groups, with each associated with a celery queue.

Audit logs supplied to the web UI are powered by the existing Airflow audit logs as well as Flask signal.

Datadog, Statsd, Grafana, and PagerDuty are all used to monitor the Airflow system.

We are a young start-up with 2 developers and a team in India looking to choose our next ETL tool. We have a few processes in Azure Data Factory but are looking to switch to a better platform. We were debating Trifacta and Airflow. Or even staying with Azure Data Factory. The use case will be to feed data to front-end APIs.

Back in 2014, I was given an opportunity to re-architect SmartZip Analytics platform, and flagship product: SmartTargeting. This is a SaaS software helping real estate professionals keeping up with their prospects and leads in a given neighborhood/territory, finding out (thanks to predictive analytics) who's the most likely to list/sell their home, and running cross-channel marketing automation against them: direct mail, online ads, email... The company also does provide Data APIs to Enterprise customers.

I had inherited years and years of technical debt and I knew things had to change radically. The first enabler to this was to make use of the cloud and go with AWS, so we would stop re-inventing the wheel, and build around managed/scalable services.

For the SaaS product, we kept on working with Rails as this was what my team had the most knowledge in. We've however broken up the monolith and decoupled the front-end application from the backend thanks to the use of Rails API so we'd get independently scalable micro-services from now on.

Our various applications could now be deployed using AWS Elastic Beanstalk so we wouldn't waste any more efforts writing time-consuming Capistrano deployment scripts for instance. Combined with Docker so our application would run within its own container, independently from the underlying host configuration.

Storage-wise, we went with Amazon S3 and ditched any pre-existing local or network storage people used to deal with in our legacy systems. On the database side: Amazon RDS / MySQL initially. Ultimately migrated to Amazon RDS for Aurora / MySQL when it got released. Once again, here you need a managed service your cloud provider handles for you.

Future improvements / technology decisions included:

Caching: Amazon ElastiCache / Memcached CDN: Amazon CloudFront Systems Integration: Segment / Zapier Data-warehousing: Amazon Redshift BI: Amazon Quicksight / Superset Search: Elasticsearch / Amazon Elasticsearch Service / Algolia Monitoring: New Relic

As our usage grows, patterns changed, and/or our business needs evolved, my role as Engineering Manager then Director of Engineering was also to ensure my team kept on learning and innovating, while delivering on business value.

One of these innovations was to get ourselves into Serverless : Adopting AWS Lambda was a big step forward. At the time, only available for Node.js (Not Ruby ) but a great way to handle cost efficiency, unpredictable traffic, sudden bursts of traffic... Ultimately you want the whole chain of services involved in a call to be serverless, and that's when we've started leveraging Amazon DynamoDB on these projects so they'd be fully scalable.

Our primary source of monitoring and alerting is Datadog. We’ve got prebuilt dashboards for every scenario and integration with PagerDuty to manage routing any alerts. We’ve definitely scaled past the point where managing dashboards is easy, but we haven’t had time to invest in using features like Anomaly Detection. We’ve started using Honeycomb for some targeted debugging of complex production issues and we are liking what we’ve seen. We capture any unhandled exceptions with Rollbar and, if we realize one will keep happening, we quickly convert the metrics to point back to Datadog, to keep Rollbar as clean as possible.

We use Segment to consolidate all of our trackers, the most important of which goes to Amplitude to analyze user patterns. However, if we need a more consolidated view, we push all of our data to our own data warehouse running PostgreSQL; this is available for analytics and dashboard creation through Looker.

This is my stack in Application & Data

JavaScript PHP HTML5 jQuery Redis Amazon EC2 Ubuntu Sass Vue.js Firebase Laravel Lumen Amazon RDS GraphQL MariaDB

My Utilities Tools

Google Analytics Postman Elasticsearch

My Devops Tools

Git GitHub GitLab npm Visual Studio Code Kibana Sentry BrowserStack

My Business Tools

Slack

Functionally, Amplitude and Mixpanel are incredibly similar. They both offer almost all the same functionality around tracking and visualizing user actions for analytics. You can track A/B test results in both. We ended up going with Amplitude at BaseDash because it has a more generous free tier for our uses (10 million actions per month, versus Mixpanel's 1000 monthly tracked users).

Segment isn't meant to compete with these tools, but instead acts as an API to send actions to them, and other analytics tools. If you're just sending event data to one of these tools, you probably don't need Segment. If you're using other analytics tools like Google Analytics and FullStory, Segment makes it easy to send events to all your tools at once.

Hi,

This is a question for best practice regarding Segment and Google Tag Manager. I would love to use Segment and GTM together when we need to implement a lot of additional tools, such as Amplitude, Appsfyler, or any other engagement tool since we can send event data without additional SDK implementation, etc.

So, my question is, if you use Segment and Google Tag Manager, how did you define what you will push through Segment and what will you push through Google Tag Manager? For example, when implementing a Facebook Pixel or any other 3rd party marketing tag?

From my point of view, implementing marketing pixels should stay in GTM because of the tag/trigger control.

If you are using Segment and GTM together, I would love to learn more about your best practice.

Thanks!

Functionally, Amplitude and Mixpanel are incredibly similar. They both offer almost all the same functionality around tracking and visualizing user actions for analytics. You can track A/B test results in both. We ended up going with Amplitude at BaseDash because it has a more generous free tier for our uses (10 million actions per month, versus Mixpanel's 1000 monthly tracked users).

Segment isn't meant to compete with these tools, but instead acts as an API to send actions to them, and other analytics tools. If you're just sending event data to one of these tools, you probably don't need Segment. If you're using other analytics tools like Google Analytics and FullStory, Segment makes it easy to send events to all your tools at once.

Hi there, we are a seed-stage startup in the personal development space. I am looking at building the marketing stack tool to have an accurate view of the user experience from acquisition through to adoption and retention for our upcoming React Native Mobile app. We qualify for the startup program of Segment and Mixpanel, which seems like a good option to get rolling and scale for free to learn how our current 60K free members will interact in the new subscription-based platform. I was considering AppsFlyer for attribution, and I am now looking at an affordable yet scalable Mobile Marketing tool vs. building in-house. Braze looks great, so does Leanplum, but the price points are 30K to start, which we can't do. I looked at OneSignal, but it doesn't have user flow visualization. I am now looking into Urban Airship and Iterable. Any advice would be much appreciated!

Functionally, Amplitude and Mixpanel are incredibly similar. They both offer almost all the same functionality around tracking and visualizing user actions for analytics. You can track A/B test results in both. We ended up going with Amplitude at BaseDash because it has a more generous free tier for our uses (10 million actions per month, versus Mixpanel's 1000 monthly tracked users).

Segment isn't meant to compete with these tools, but instead acts as an API to send actions to them, and other analytics tools. If you're just sending event data to one of these tools, you probably don't need Segment. If you're using other analytics tools like Google Analytics and FullStory, Segment makes it easy to send events to all your tools at once.

Hi there, we are a seed-stage startup in the personal development space. I am looking at building the marketing stack tool to have an accurate view of the user experience from acquisition through to adoption and retention for our upcoming React Native Mobile app. We qualify for the startup program of Segment and Mixpanel, which seems like a good option to get rolling and scale for free to learn how our current 60K free members will interact in the new subscription-based platform. I was considering AppsFlyer for attribution, and I am now looking at an affordable yet scalable Mobile Marketing tool vs. building in-house. Braze looks great, so does Leanplum, but the price points are 30K to start, which we can't do. I looked at OneSignal, but it doesn't have user flow visualization. I am now looking into Urban Airship and Iterable. Any advice would be much appreciated!

Hey all, I'm managing the implementation of a customer data platform and headless CMS for a digital consumer content publisher. We're weighing up the pros and cons of implementing an OTB activation platform like Optimizely Recommendations or Dynamic Yield vs developing a bespoke solution for personalising content recommendations. Use Case is CDP will house customers and personas, and headless CMS will contain the individual content assets. The intermediary solution will activate data between the two for personalisation of news content feeds. I saw GCP has some potentially applicable personalisation solutions such as recommendations AI, which seem to be targeted at retail, but would probably be relevant to this use case for all intents and purposes. The CDP is Segment and the CMS is Contentstack. Has anyone implemented an activation platform or personalisation solution under similar circumstances? Any advice or direction would be appreciated! Thank you