Alternatives to Google BigQuery

Context: I wanted to create an end to end IoT data pipeline simulation in Google Cloud IoT Core and other GCP services. I never touched Terraform meaningfully until working on this project, and it's one of the best explorations in my development career. The documentation and syntax is incredibly human-readable and friendly. I'm used to building infrastructure through the google apis via Python , but I'm so glad past Sung did not make that decision. I was tempted to use Google Cloud Deployment Manager, but the templates were a bit convoluted by first impression. I'm glad past Sung did not make this decision either.

Solution: Leveraging Google Cloud Build Google Cloud Run Google Cloud Bigtable Google BigQuery Google Cloud Storage Google Compute Engine along with some other fun tools, I can deploy over 40 GCP resources using Terraform!

Check Out My Architecture: CLICK ME

Check out the GitHub repo attached

I'm trying to build a way to read financial data really, really fast, for low cost. We are write/update-light (in this arena) and read-heavy. Google BigQuery being serverless can keep costs beyond low, but query speeds are always a few seconds because, I think, of the lack of indexing and potential to take advantage of the structure of the common queries. I have tried various partitions on BigQuery to speed things up too with some success but nothing extraordinary. I have never used Google Cloud Bigtable but get how it works conceptually. I believe it would make date-range based queries markedly faster. Question is, are there ways to take advantage of date-ranges in BigQuery, or does it makes sense to just shift to BigTable for mega-fast reads? I'd love to get sub-50ms.

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.

Looker , Stitch , Amazon Redshift , dbt

We recently moved our Data Analytics and Business Intelligence tooling to Looker . It's already helping us create a solid process for reusable SQL-based data modeling, with consistent definitions across the entire organizations. Looker allows us to collaboratively build these version-controlled models and push the limits of what we've traditionally been able to accomplish with analytics with a lean team.

For Data Engineering, we're in the process of moving from maintaining our own ETL pipelines on AWS to a managed ELT system on Stitch. We're also evaluating the command line tool, dbt to manage data transformations. Our hope is that Stitch + dbt will streamline the ELT bit, allowing us to focus our energies on analyzing data, rather than managing it.

The early data ingestion pipeline at Pinterest used Kafka as the central message transporter, with the app servers writing messages directly to Kafka, which then uploaded log files to S3.

For databases, a custom Hadoop streamer pulled database data and wrote it to S3.

Challenges cited for this infrastructure included high operational overhead, as well as potential data loss occurring when Kafka broker outages led to an overflow of in-memory message buffering.

Why we built Marmaray, an open source generic data ingestion and dispersal framework and library for Apache Hadoop :

Built and designed by our Hadoop Platform team, Marmaray is a plug-in-based framework built on top of the Hadoop ecosystem. Users can add support to ingest data from any source and disperse to any sink leveraging the use of Apache Spark . The name, Marmaray, comes from a tunnel in Turkey connecting Europe and Asia. Similarly, we envisioned Marmaray within Uber as a pipeline connecting data from any source to any sink depending on customer preference:

https://eng.uber.com/marmaray-hadoop-ingestion-open-source/

(Direct GitHub repo: https://github.com/uber/marmaray Kafka Kafka Manager )

I'm wondering if any Cloud Firestore users might be open to sharing some input and challenges encountered when trying to create a low-cost, low-latency data pipeline to their Analytics warehouse (e.g. Google BigQuery, Snowflake, etc...)

I'm working with a platform by the name of Estuary.dev, an ETL/ELT and we are conducting some research on the pain points here to see if there are drawbacks of the Firestore->BQ extension and/or if users are seeking easy ways for getting nosql->fine-grained tabular data

Please feel free to drop some knowledge/wish list stuff on me for a better pipeline here!

I use Google BigQuery because it makes is super easy to query and store data for analytics workloads. If you're using GCP, you're likely using BigQuery. However, running data viz tools directly connected to BigQuery will run pretty slow. They recently announced BI Engine which will hopefully compete well against big players like Snowflake when it comes to concurrency.

What's nice too is that it has SQL-based ML tools, and it has great GIS support!

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.

We've been using PostgreSQL since the very early days of Zulip, but we actually didn't use it from the beginning. Zulip started out as a MySQL project back in 2012, because we'd heard it was a good choice for a startup with a wide community. However, we found that even though we were using the Django ORM for most of our database access, we spent a lot of time fighting with MySQL. Issues ranged from bad collation defaults, to bad query plans which required a lot of manual query tweaks.

We ended up getting so frustrated that we tried out PostgresQL, and the results were fantastic. We didn't have to do any real customization (just some tuning settings for how big a server we had), and all of our most important queries were faster out of the box. As a result, we were able to delete a bunch of custom queries escaping the ORM that we'd written to make the MySQL query planner happy (because postgres just did the right thing automatically).

And then after that, we've just gotten a ton of value out of postgres. We use its excellent built-in full-text search, which has helped us avoid needing to bring in a tool like Elasticsearch, and we've really enjoyed features like its partial indexes, which saved us a lot of work adding unnecessary extra tables to get good performance for things like our "unread messages" and "starred messages" indexes.

I can't recommend it highly enough.

Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

So, I have data in Amazon S3 as parquet files and I have it available in the Glue data catalog too. I want to build an AppSync API on top of this data. Now the two options that I am considering are:

1. Bring the data to Amazon DynamoDB and then build my API on top of this Database.

2. Add a Lambda function that resolves Amazon Athena queries made by AppSync.

Which of the two approaches will be cost effective?

I would really appreciate some back of the envelope estimates too.

Note: I only expect to make read queries. Thanks.

I use Amazon Athena because similar to Google BigQuery , you can store and query data easily. Especially since you can define data schema in the Glue data catalog, there's a central way to define data models.

However, I would not recommend for batch jobs. I typically use this to check intermediary datasets in data engineering workloads. It's good for getting a look and feel of the data along its ETL journey.

When I joined NYT there was already broad dissatisfaction with the LAMP (Linux Apache HTTP Server MySQL PHP) Stack and the front end framework, in particular. So, I wasn't passing judgment on it. I mean, LAMP's fine, you can do good work in LAMP. It's a little dated at this point, but it's not ... I didn't want to rip it out for its own sake, but everyone else was like, "We don't like this, it's really inflexible." And I remember from being outside the company when that was called MIT FIVE when it had launched. And been observing it from the outside, and I was like, you guys took so long to do that and you did it so carefully, and yet you're not happy with your decisions. Why is that? That was more the impetus. If we're going to do this again, how are we going to do it in a way that we're gonna get a better result?

So we're moving quickly away from LAMP, I would say. So, right now, the new front end is React based and using Apollo. And we've been in a long, protracted, gradual rollout of the core experiences.

React is now talking to GraphQL as a primary API. There's a Node.js back end, to the front end, which is mainly for server-side rendering, as well.

Behind there, the main repository for the GraphQL server is a big table repository, that we call Bodega because it's a convenience store. And that reads off of a Kafka pipeline.

We've been using PostgreSQL since the very early days of Zulip, but we actually didn't use it from the beginning. Zulip started out as a MySQL project back in 2012, because we'd heard it was a good choice for a startup with a wide community. However, we found that even though we were using the Django ORM for most of our database access, we spent a lot of time fighting with MySQL. Issues ranged from bad collation defaults, to bad query plans which required a lot of manual query tweaks.

We ended up getting so frustrated that we tried out PostgresQL, and the results were fantastic. We didn't have to do any real customization (just some tuning settings for how big a server we had), and all of our most important queries were faster out of the box. As a result, we were able to delete a bunch of custom queries escaping the ORM that we'd written to make the MySQL query planner happy (because postgres just did the right thing automatically).

And then after that, we've just gotten a ton of value out of postgres. We use its excellent built-in full-text search, which has helped us avoid needing to bring in a tool like Elasticsearch, and we've really enjoyed features like its partial indexes, which saved us a lot of work adding unnecessary extra tables to get good performance for things like our "unread messages" and "starred messages" indexes.

I can't recommend it highly enough.