Cloud articles

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Serverless streaming processing on the cloud: Azure Stream Analytics vs AWS Kinesis Data Analytics

I was writing this blog post while preparing for Azure's DP-200 and DP-201 certification. Why? To make some cleaning in my head and organize what I learned about Azure Stream Analytics and compare it with what I knew about AWS Kinesis Analytics.

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Data architectures on the cloud

I haven't fully understood it yet, why the story of data architectures is the story of Greek letters. With time, they changed the context and had to adapt from an on-premise environment, often sharing the same main services, to the cloud. In this blog post, I will shortly present data architectures and try to fit them to cloud data services on AWS, Azure and GCP. Spoiler alert, there will be more pictures than usual!

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Windows to the clouds

Guess what? My time-consuming learning mode based on reading the documentation paid again! This time on Azure because while reading about Stream Analytics windows I discovered that I missed some of them in the past. And since today is the day of the cloud, I will see if the same types of windows exist on AWS and GCP streaming services. And if no, what are the differences.

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AWS Redshift vs Azure Synapse Analytics

You know me already. I like to compare things to spot some differences and similarities. This time, I will do this exercise for cloud data warehouses, AWS Redshift, and Azure Synapse Analytics.

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Small data processing on the cloud

Believe it or not, but data processing is not only about Big Data. Even though data is one of the most important assets for modern data-driven companies, there is still a need to process small data. And to do that, you will not necessarily use the same tools as for bigger datasets.

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Object stores on the cloud

The next step of my multi-cloud exploration will be object stores. In the article I will try to find similarities between S3, Storage Account and GCS.

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Dead-letter pattern on the cloud

Data is not always as clean as we would like it to be. The statement is even more true for semi-structured formats like JSON, where we feel working with a structure, but unfortunately, it's not enforced. Hence, from time to time, our code can unexpectedly fail. To handle this problem - as for many others - there is a pattern. It's called dead-letter qnd I will describe it below in the context of cloud services.

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Azure Data Factory control flows in Apache Airflow

How to orchestrate your data pipelines on the cloud? Often, you will have a possibility to use managed Open Source tools like Cloud Composer on GCP or Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow on AWS. Sometimes, you will need to use cloud services like for Azure and its Data Factory orchestrator. Is it complicated to create Data Factory pipelines with the Apache Airflow knowledge? We'll see that in this blog post.

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Streaming data sources on the cloud

Streaming broker is one of very common entry points for modern data systems. Since they're running on the cloud, and that one of my goals for this year is to acquire a multi-cloud vision, it's a moment to see what AWS, Azure and GCP propose in this field!

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My journey to Azure Data Engineer Associate

I'm happy to complete my quest for data engineering certification on top of 3 major cloud providers. Last year I became AWS Big Data certified, in January a GCP Data Engineer, and more recently, I passed DP-200 and DP-201 and became an Azure Data Engineer Associate. Although DP-203 will soon replace the 2 exams, I hope this article will help you prepare for it!

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Serverless streaming on AWS - an overview

If you already worked on AWS and tried to implement streaming applications, you certainly noticed one thing. There is no single way to do it! And if you didn't notice that, I hope that this blog post will convince you, and by the way, help you to get a better understanding of the available solutions.

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What's new on the cloud for data engineers - part 3 (02-04.2021)

It's time for the 3rd part of "What's new on the cloud for data engineers" series. This time I will cover the changes between February and April.

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Make your data disappear on the cloud

Even though the storage is cheap and virtually unlimited, it doesn't mean we have to store all the data all the time. And to deal with this lifecycle requirement, we can either write a pipeline that will remove obsolete records or we can rely on the cloud services offerings for data management. I propose a short overview of them in this blog post.

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GCP Dataflow by an Apache Spark guy

Some months ago I wrote a blog post where I presented BigQuery from a perspective of an Apache Spark user. Today I will do the same exercise but applied to the same category of data processing frameworks. In other words, I will try to understand GCP Dataflow thanks to my Apache Spark knowledge!

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AWS Redshift vs GCP BigQuery

Despite the recent architectural proposals with the lakehouse principle, a data warehouse is still an important part of a data system. But there is no "a single way" to do it and if you analyze the cloud providers, you will see various offerings like Redshift (AWS) or BigQuery (GCP), presented in this article.

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GCP BigQuery by an Apache Spark guy

One of the steps in my preparation for the GCP Data Engineer certificate was the work with "Google BigQuery: The Definitive Guide: Data Warehousing, Analytics, and Machine Learning at Scale" book. And to be honest, I didn't expect that knowing Apache Spark will help me so much in understanding the architectural concepts. If you don't believe, I will try to convince you in this blog post.

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GCP BigTable or AWS DynamoDB, yet another comparison

As you know from the last 2020 blog post, one of my new goals is to be proficient at working with AWS, Azure and GCP data services. One of the building blocks of the process is finding some patterns and identifying the differences. And before doing that exercise for BigTable (GCP) and DynamoDB (AWS), I thought both were pretty the same. However, you can't imagine how wrong I was with this assumption!

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My journey to GCP Data Engineer

Last December I passed the GCP Data Engineer exam and got my certification as a late Christmas gift! As for AWS Big Data specialty, I would like to share with you some feedback from my preparation process. Spoiler alert: I did it without any online course!

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What's new on the cloud for data engineers - part 2 (11.2020-01.2021)

It's time for the second update with the news on cloud data services. This time too, a lot of things happened!

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Lakehouse and BigQuery?

You know me already, I'm a big fan of Apache Spark but also of all kinds of patterns. And one of the patterns that nowadays gains in popularity is lakehouse. Most of the time (always?), this pattern is implemented on top of an ACID-compatible file system like Apache Hudi, Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake. But can we do it differently and use another storage, like BigQuery?

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