Fueling innovative software
July 15-18, 2019
Portland, OR

How to get the most out of your streaming data infrastructure

Alex Silva (Pluralsight)
2:35pm–3:15pm Thursday, July 18, 2019
Building Data-Intensive Applications
 Location: E143/144
Secondary topics:  Data Driven
Average rating: ***..
(3.67, 3 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

  • Software engineers, data engineers, product managers, software architects, and data architects

Level

Intermediate

Description

Avoid some of the most common issues and traps when designing your streaming data infrastructure while learning the easy way the lessons Pluralsight had to learn the hard way.

Alex Silva outlines lessons learned, common pitfalls, and design traps from Pluralsight’s transition. He explores how the concepts relate to the process of building Pluralsight’s data platform, including the data infrastructure, team, and organizational challenges and the current technology stack, and he passes on 21 best practices and standards you can use in your company. Some of the topics he covers include the importance of standards when designing a company-wide infrastructure; different data stream types and when to use them; keeping end users in mind; the trade-offs between scale, flexibility, and speed; data model ownership; and schema importance in streaming pipelines.

Prerequisite knowledge

  • A basic understanding of the streaming and fast data environments

What you'll learn

  • Understand proven standards and practices that allow companies to better design data infrastructures
Photo of Alex Silva

Alex Silva

Pluralsight

Alex Silva is a chief data architect at Pluralsight, where he leads the development of the company’s data infrastructure and services. He’s been instrumental in establishing Pluralsight’s data initiative by architecting a platform to capture valuable insights on real-time video analytics while integrating several data sources within the business. He’s built a reputation as a passionate and pragmatic data evangelist. Previously, Alex was a principal data engineer at Rackspace, leading a team of developers building its data initiative, while establishing its big data platform by helping architect a solution to drive actionable insight on consumer behavior and product-usage trends and designing analytical models, APIs, and frameworks to deliver fanatical support, including a computational linguistics library to analyze and classify support chat logs; a principle software engineer at ESPN Emerging Technologies, where he architected and developed a distributed application to help basketball operators collect play-by-play records; and several senior-level engineering positions at Walt Disney World Internet Group, Pentaho, OutStart, and Travelatro.com. He’s Sun Certified as an enterprise architect for the J2EE platform and is a web component developer and a Java 2 programmer. He earned his bachelor’s degree in molecular biology and an MBA from the University of Central Florida in Orlando. When Alex is not programming, you’ll probably catch him with an athletic bag on his shoulders. He’s a little bit of a sports junkie, particularly a CrossFit addict, who’s been known to create an epidemic of fitness recovery, smoking cessation, and weight loss around him.