Alation is a leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, including data search and discovery, governance, stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation. Alation’s initial offering dominates the data catalog market. With a powerful Behavioral Analysis Engine, inbuilt collaboration capabilities, and open interfaces, Alation combines machine learning with human insight to successfully tackle even the most demanding challenges in data and metadata management. To learn more, go to alation.com
Data Intelligence, Data Catalog, Data Governance
Redwood City, CA
Modernize its infrastructure on AWS to test new features against multiple data platforms.
Infrastructure Modernization, DevOps, CI/CD, Data & Analytics
Improved efficiency
Enhanced scalability and reliability
Cost optimization
Alation’s products run on many different data platforms, from standard MySQL and enterprise-grade Oracle databases to open-source Big Data Clusters such as Cloudera Distribution Hadoop (CDH) or Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP). Alation’s development team faced serious time constraints when testing new features against these multiple data platforms. Its support team needed to verify and isolate the cause of potential issues with customer installations.
Alation required a flexible and readily available testing infrastructure. The company approached nClouds to assist with developing and implementing a cost-effective solution to its challenges.
By taking advantage of AWS’s flexible on-demand architecture, Alation can create the required test configurations for a wide variety of databases from many vendors in a completely automated fashion. A specified test infrastructure is brought up as part of a Jenkins-based CI/CD solution. Database and data platforms are automatically deleted at the end of the integration test phase. This automated process also helps to provide developers with version-specific development resources reliably.
Alation can now reliably reproduce test environments that before were handcrafted and static. Test infrastructure that took hours or maybe days to create can now be brought up in a few minutes or an hour, depending on the complexity of the data platform.
Teaming with nClouds, Alation now has completely automated its platform-specific test resources. Alation can test a wide variety of databases from many vendors. The project has yielded numerous benefits:
Alation’s completely automated test configurations enable its new testing infrastructure to be brought up in minutes versus hours. Amazon RDS automates time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.
Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS provide resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2 instances can be resized, and the number of instances scaled up or down in minutes with an SLA commitment of 99.99% reliability.
Using Terraform’s infrastructure as code (IaC), all resources are represented in code, providing Alation with visibility to what is running and what shouldn’t be. AWS resources are brought up and removed on demand, enabling Alation to save costs by stopping or rightsizing instances with low utilization.
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