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End-to-End Data Discovery, Observability, and Governance on AWS with LinkedIn’s Open-source DataHub
Use DataHub’s data catalog capabilities to collect, organize, enrich, and search for metadata across multiple platforms
Introduction
According to Shirshanka Das, Founder of LinkedIn DataHub, Apache Gobblin, and Acryl Data, one of the simplest definitions for a data catalog can be found on the Oracle website: “Simply put, a data catalog is an organized inventory of data assets in the organization. It uses metadata to help organizations manage their data. It also helps data professionals collect, organize, access, and enrich metadata to support data discovery and governance.”
Another succinct description of a data catalog’s purpose comes from Alation: “a collection of metadata, combined with data management and search tools, that helps analysts and other data users to find the data that they need, serves as an inventory of available data, and provides information to evaluate the fitness of data for intended uses.”
Working with many organizations in the area of Analytics, one of the more common requests I receive regards choosing and implementing a data catalog. Organizations have datasources hosted in corporate data centers, on AWS, by SaaS providers, and with other Cloud Service Providers. Several of these organizations have recently gravitated to DataHub, the open-source metadata platform for the modern data stack, originally developed by LinkedIn.
In this post, we will explore the capabilities of DataHub to build a centralized data catalog on AWS for datasources hosted in multiple AWS accounts, SaaS providers, cloud service providers, and corporate data centers. I will demonstrate how to build a DataHub data catalog using out-of-the-box data source plugins for automated metadata ingestion.
Data Catalog Competitors
Data catalogs are not new; technologies such as data dictionaries have been around as far back as the 1980’s. Gartner…
